In 2007, a team of civilians with a rare set of specialized skills joined a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division deployed to eastern Afghanistan. The civilian team’s leader was a former Special Forces officer; he was accompanied by a West Point graduate who had studied anthropology and described herself as a “high-risk ethnographer.” She asked reporters to identify her only as Tracy

Tracy and her colleagues were part of the Human Terrain System, a project whose creators saw themselves as a band of progressive upstarts seeking to transform the Army from within. The program’s goal was to draw on the tools of anthropology to help U.S. soldiers better understand Afghanistan.

Known as AF1, Tracy’s group was the first Human Terrain Team to deploy in the field—and it quickly made an impact. In one community, Tracy pointed out that the Haqqani network, an anti-American group of insurgents, was gaining strength because an uncommonly large number of Afghan widows depended on their sons for support. With few jobs available, many young men were forced to join the insurgency to earn money. On the advice of the Human Terrain Team, soldiers started a job-training program that put the widows to work and cut the insurgents’ supply of recruits. The Human Terrain Team even convinced the Army to refurbish a mosque on the American base—a project that was credited with cutting insurgent rocket attacks.

Not all of Tracy’s insights led to perfect results, but on the whole the experiment appeared to be a major success. Tracy was “taking the population and dissecting it,” an officer who worked with her told The Christian Science Monitor; she was giving soldiers “data points” that helped them resolve local disputes and identify problems before they turned violent. Col. Martin Schweitzer, the commander of the brigade with which Tracy had deployed, would become one of the Human Terrain System’s biggest supporters. He believed that Tracy and her team had made U.S. soldiers and Afghans safer while speeding the work of connecting Afghans to their government. When Schweitzer had arrived in Khost, only 19 of 86 districts supported the U.S.-backed Afghan government. By the end of his deployment, he estimated that 72 of them did. He credited Tracy and her team with reducing his unit’s combat operations in the province by 60 percent to 70 percent.

In attributing a measure of his brigade’s success to the work of the Human Terrain Team, Schweitzer helped lay the groundwork for the project’s extraordinarily rapid growth. By the fall of 2007, the Defense Department had authorized a $40 million expansion of the Human Terrain System that would more than quintuple the projected number of teams in Iraq and Afghanistan.

THE HUMAN Terrain System owed its creation to many different people, but one of the key players was a renegade anthropologist named Montgomery McFate. McFate was the product of contradictions: California beatnik counterculture, a familial fascination with the primitive “other,” and a quiet but persistent strain of military DNA that was as mainline American as it got. Born in 1966 to a mother who made and sold faux ethnographic artifacts and a father who was a former Marine, she had grown up on a barge in a radical, chaotic houseboat community in Richardson Bay, near San Francisco. The writer Cintra Wilson, McFate’s oldest and closest friend, described the houseboat communities of their childhood as a “social experiment.” “We were essentially raised by pirates,” Wilson told me.

McFate eventually attended community college, then Berkeley, then Yale, where she got her Ph.D. in anthropology. But even before she finished her dissertation, she had grown tired of anthropology. “I wanted to do something in the world, not just write about it,” she told me. She went to Harvard Law School, where she met the young Army officer who would become her husband when he visited for a weekend. They moved to Germany, where he was stationed, before relocating to Washington, D.C. McFate took a contract job with the CIA, traveling to Europe to conduct research. She was not a clandestine agent, but neither did she tell her interview subjects that she worked for an intelligence agency. She moved on to the RAND Corporation, and in 2003, to the Office of Naval Research, which had supported the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict half a century earlier. By this time, McFate had started to wonder in earnest how anthropology might contribute to the needs of a military she had grown to respect.

She began a concerted networking campaign. During a conversation with the commander of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, McFate suggested that cultural misunderstandings had caused difficulties for Marines in Iraq. “I don’t have any facts about that,” she recalled the general telling her. “I’d like you to do a study.” She started interviewing Marines, and later soldiers and sailors, returning from Iraq. Somewhere along the way, she heard the name of a Pentagon science adviser and wrote it down, but she never got around to calling him. One day, out of nowhere, he called her. Could she come to the Pentagon?

The adviser’s name was Hriar Cabayan. He was one of the Pentagon’s biggest brains, and he was looking for an anthropologist to help him solve a critical problem. It was 2004, and buried bombs were killing 100 American soldiers a week in Iraq. But the Army knew almost nothing about who was planting the bombs, and why. Most soldiers spoke no Arabic. Whatever knowledge they gained about tribal and familial relations, economic behavior, and cultural nuances during their deployments was lost when they left and the next unit arrived. Cabayan recruited McFate to help him build an ethnographic database that could be loaded onto a laptop and used by soldiers in the field. It would later be called Cultural Preparation of the Environment, and it was an open-source intelligence tool designed to reduce violence by understanding the sea in which the enemy swam.

But McFate would soon advocate going a step further and sending civilian social scientists into the field with soldiers—the idea that eventually became the Human Terrain System. She was not the concept’s only supporter; indeed, it’s hard to attribute the idea to one person. A young Army Reserve captain named Don Smith, who would become the Human Terrain System’s first program manager, told me he came up with the idea at his kitchen table. Steve Fondacaro, an iconoclastic, wiry, 30-year veteran of the military who would succeed Smith as the program’s leader, said he was the one who pushed to send social scientists into conflict zones with soldiers.

At the time, the idea of installing a team of cultural experts in a military unit resonated within an Army that was doing some serious soul-searching. Thanks in part to Gen. David Petraeus, the Army was rethinking how to fight insurgencies—and arriving at the conclusion that a more thoughtful approach was needed in dealing with local populations. “Not understanding the human terrain has the same effect on your operations that not understanding the physical terrain has on conventional military operations,” Petraeus would later tell me. “If you don’t really appreciate the physical terrain and its impact on your operations, you don’t succeed. If you don’t understand the human terrain in the conduct of population-centric counterinsurgency operations, you don’t succeed.”

But while the use of anthropology made sense to some in the military, it deeply disturbed many anthropologists. Beginning in 2007, a small group of anthropologists carried on a vigorous, public argument with McFate and other champions of anthropology as a tool for counterinsurgency. McFate’s critics advanced three main arguments: first, that deploying social scientists to war zones, particularly to gather military intelligence, could endanger the people being studied and lead all anthropologists to be viewed as spies; second, that anthropology is not predictive and does not yield the kind of data useful for military operations; and third, that, on principle, anthropology should not be used to subjugate unruly people while expanding American power.

Indeed, many anthropologists remembered how anthropology had been used as a tool of imperialism in the 1800s and early 1900s. “Of all the modern social sciences, anthropology is the one historically most closely tied to colonialism,” Edward Said once wrote, “since it has often been the case that since the mid-nineteenth century anthropologists and ethnologists were also advisors to colonial rulers on the manners and mores of the native people to be ruled.”

IN FEBRUARY 2009, I flew to Leavenworth, Kansas, to learn how the Human Terrain System prepared field team members for deployment to a war zone. The training at that time consisted of four to five months of classroom work that included basic social science and research methods, military rank structure, and courses on culture and history tailored to Iraq or Afghanistan. There was also a period of several weeks known as “immersion,” when trainees bound for Afghanistan spent time at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, studying Dari and talking with Afghan-Americans, while those headed for Iraq undertook a special course at the University of Kansas.

My minder during my weeklong visit was Maj. Robert Holbert, an Army reservist and former high-school social-studies teacher who had served on the first Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan, and who embodied the offbeat, left-leaning vibe the program sought to project. A convert to Islam with a shaved head, Holbert drove a Saab and listened to the Sex Pistols.

Human Terrain System training took place in the basement of a brick mini-mall in downtown Leavenworth called the Landing. The old federal prison and the sprawling Army garrison that anchor the town lie about a mile to the northwest. Fort Leavenworth is home to midcareer master’s programs for officers; it is where the Army contemplates its past and tries to get ahead of its future. The Human Terrain System laid claim to this spirit of military intellectualism, but if the rolling lawns of the base conjured a gracious university, the Landing had the dismal, downtrodden feel of an underfunded community college.

The program’s administrators had told me that the most interesting part of the training cycle would be the final week, when proto–Human Terrain Team members took part in a practical exercise to test what they had learned. The exercise was called Weston Resolve, named for the town of Weston, Missouri, near Leavenworth, where some of it took place. The Human Terrain System’s press handler, former Army intelligence officer Lt. George Mace—a veteran of the first Human Terrain Team to deploy in Iraq—described Weston Resolve to me as “a practicum in doing ethnography in any kind of village.”

The exercise was an elaborate game that began with the imagined secession from the United States of a big swath of territory between the Dakotas and Missouri. In keeping with this fictional turn of events, separatist groups and criminal elements were supposedly making trouble in eastern Kansas, burglarizing a pharmacy in Leavenworth, among other misdeeds. The U.S. government feared that crime syndicates and terrorists would commandeer this unstable new quadrant of the heartland for their own ends, and they sought to bring the revolt under control. The trainees’ job was to figure out as unobtrusively as possible what kind of people lived along the Kansas-Missouri border and to gather information about their customs, values, and beliefs.

The exercise began early on an icy morning in a parking lot a few blocks from the Landing. I followed the trainees around as they interviewed a young woman making smoothies at a local gym, a man on an exercise bike, mall walkers, college students, and people eating lunch at the food court on the nearby military base. The trainees asked people about their greatest successes and failures, whether it was appropriate in their culture for a little girl to talk to an older man she didn’t know, and what they had worried about most in the last month.

“What’s the most offensive thing you’ve seen someone do in public?” one of the trainees asked.

“Shoot someone,” the girl said.

“What’s the worst thing a friend can do?”

“Go behind my back and cheat with my boyfriend that I’d had for two years.”

The Human Terrain System had been sold to the Army as a means of providing cultural knowledge to battlefield commanders. But as I watched the trainees interview residents near the Kansas-Missouri border, it became clear that whatever information they would be providing did not stem from any special knowledge of Iraqi or Afghan culture. Instead of offering cultural expertise, the Human Terrain System was training recruits to parachute into places they’d never been, gather information as quickly as possible, and translate it into something that might be useful to a military commander. One of the few Human Terrain social scientists I met with relevant experience, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology who had done his dissertation fieldwork in Afghanistan, would describe his Human Terrain work as “windshield ethnography.”

Thrown together at the Landing were former intelligence officers, ­defense-industry contractors, social scientists of various and often conflicting persuasions, military reservists, and immigrants with language skills. Teammates often shared little beyond a very general understanding of what they were doing and why. In the words of one former Human Terrain Team member, they specialized in “that touchy-feely thing that no one understood.” Some thought they were part of a humanitarian aid mission. Others thought they were there to tell the commander why local people supported the insurgency. Still others saw it as a chance to play spy. I had expected to find wide-eyed hopefulness and team spirit. Instead—perhaps because three Human Terrain Team members had recently been killed in the field—the place had a tense, fevered quality.

From the program’s beginning until at least late 2010, Human Terrain Team members got no operational security training, no survival skills beyond a brief medical course, no firearms training. “As a member of a 5-person HTS team, you will be safely attached to a brigade combat team,” read a cheerful 2008 recruitment brochure from BAE Systems, the big defense contractor that hired Human Terrain Team members during that period. But what could being “safely attached” to a United States military unit in Afghanistan possibly mean? Some military units gave their Human Terrain Team members guns, but often the civilians had little or no idea how to use them.

On my first morning in Kansas, the cultural anthropologist in the group I was observing told me he didn’t want anyone to know who he was. When I reminded him that I was a reporter and pointed out that the information he had already given me—including his surname and the name of a university where he had taught—would likely identify him, he grew agitated. “I’m an anthropologist,” he told me. “I have a lot of anthropologist friends, and I don’t want to get a bunch of emails telling me I’m the scum of the earth for joining this program.”

IN MARCH 2009, I flew to Kandahar to embed with a Human Terrain Team called AF4, which was operating in Maiwand, a contested stretch of desert west of Kandahar. The team had recently been reconstituted after one of its members had been attacked by an Afghan and her teammate had responded by killing her assailant. The new team included a 64-year-old psychologist from Texas, a middle-aged former Marine, and a 31-year-old with a master’s degree in Central Asian studies—none of whom had ever been to Afghanistan.

I wanted to believe in the Human Terrain System’s capacity to make the U.S. military smarter, but the more time I spent with the team, the more confused I became. The psychologist, a tall man with wire-rimmed glasses named Karl Slaikeu, was a can-do type who had apparently figured out how to solve the region’s security problems before ever setting foot in Afghanistan. One afternoon, I watched as he tried to convince two Canadian soldiers and a USAID officer who had been in Afghanistan far longer than he had that he understood the place better than they did. Later, I asked one of the Canadians what he thought of the Human Terrain Team members. “I don’t know where they got these guys,” the Canadian soldier told me, shaking his head.

Slaikeu had been issued an assault rifle but neither the Human Terrain System nor the Army had trained him to use it. He’d gone out and shot on a range near his home in Texas, and one of his teammates had taken him to shoot on a military range in Afghanistan.

The former Marine went by the nickname Banger. He wore a thick beard, carried copious ammunition, and sometimes advised Slaikeu not to chamber a round when we traveled in armored vehicles for fear the bespectacled social scientist’s gun might fire by mistake when we went over a bump.

Early in my visit, when I was just getting to know the Human Terrain Team members, I accompanied Banger and some soldiers to a barbecue at a nearby Afghan army base. I liked Banger. He was refreshingly unpretentious. He had grown up on a farm in Iowa, and his understanding of rural, agrarian culture gave him a winning ease with the Afghan farmers he met on patrols. The Americans had organized the barbecue to celebrate the Persian New Year, Nowruz, and to boost the morale of the local Afghan army unit they were mentoring. They brought boxes of burgers, Rice Krispies treats, soda, and Gatorade, but the Afghans had other ideas. They invited the Americans to join them on a patch of gravel near the kitchen, where the cooks were about to slaughter a goat for lunch.

Banger and I went along to watch. We were deep in the Afghan south, but I noticed that many Afghan soldiers at the base were Tajiks from the north. This was not unusual; the Afghan army has had much greater success recruiting Tajiks than Pashtuns. As we stood there, two Afghans dressed in Army fatigue pants and plain T-shirts grabbed a goat that had been loping around the yard, and then proceeded to slaughter and skin it. These two men were dressed like the other soldiers, but they had smooth brown faces and the Asiatic features of Hazaras, an Afghan ethnic group concentrated in the center of the country. Hazaras have long occupied the lowest rung in Afghanistan’s ethnic hierarchy, so it was no surprise that these men had the job of butchering an animal and cooking for the other soldiers. In Kabul, Hazara men haul carts like oxen and many Hazara women work as cooks and housemaids. I said something about this to Banger.

“What?” he said.

“Hazaras always get the worst jobs.”

“Huh?”

It took me a few seconds to realize that he had no idea what I was talking about. “Look at those men,” I told him, motioning toward the cooks. “Do you see any difference between them and the others?”

He thought about it. “I guess,” he said.

Afghan tribal structures are complex and fragmented, but the fact that there are several major ethnic groups who control various regions of the country and don’t always get along is about as basic as Afghan cultural knowledge gets. That Hazaras make up an often oppressed minority is not difficult to understand if you have spent five minutes observing the country. It would have been one thing if Banger had been an ordinary soldier. But soldiers and officers often described him and his teammates to me as “cultural experts.” Banger had never before been to Afghanistan, but he had worked at the Army Culture Center and sat through five months of Human Terrain System training. I wondered how he had come so far without knowing what a Hazara was.

A year later, after a lengthy deployment in southern Afghanistan, Banger emailed me: “You should interview me now! I have learned a great deal. I can also differentiate between Hazara and Pashto.” He was learning on the ground, just as soldiers did.

A more culturally knowledgeable member of AF4 was the 31-year-old. He spoke some Pashto and asked that I identify him only by his nickname, “Spen,” an Afghan approximation of “Whitey.” I had been warned by other members of the team that Spen was a disgruntled naysayer and that I shouldn’t put much stock in what he told me. But as we walked the uneven gravel that covered the desert ground at Forward Operating Base Ramrod, Spen told me of his initial hope for the Human Terrain System and his subsequent disappointment.

By far the most serious problem, in his view, was the lack of specific cultural knowledge or expertise among Human Terrain Team members. What about you? I asked. Spen turned to me sharply. “This is my first time to actually live in Afghanistan, and I don’t really even live in Afghanistan,” he said. “I live on an American base with lots of young men from all over the United States, a lot of wonderful young men, but I don’t live with Afghans. I hang out with the interpreters, who aren’t even local. They’re actually all from Kabul.” He traveled to Afghanistan two or three times a week when he went out on patrols with the soldiers around the region. “I go to Afghanistan for half the day and I come back,” he told me. “Other people have claimed I’m an expert after I’ve told them I’m not. The whole notion of being an expert I find very entertaining, because I think that’s part of the problem of the U.S. situation in Afghanistan: we’re being misled by a lot of self-proclaimed experts.”

He was right about the lack of expertise, but the Army mostly didn’t know the difference. For many young soldiers I met, cultural finesse still amounted to the response of a turret gunner one day on patrol, when an approaching car failed to heed the Americans’ signals to slow down. The gunner remembered the Pashto word for “stop.”

IN THE summer of 2009, 10,000 American Marines landed in Helmand province, the first wave of a troop surge that would build through mid-2010. A small number of British forces had been struggling and losing ground for years in the rural southwestern province, where the insurgency had dug in and metastasized. A new Human Terrain Team, known as AF6, was sent to work with the Marines at their main base, a sprawling desert outpost called Camp Leatherneck.

The team’s leader was Steve Lacy, a thoughtful, serious Army officer and lawyer I’d met during my visit to Leavenworth. With him were Cas Dunlap, an information operations specialist, and AnnaMaria Cardinalli, a former FBI analyst, flamenco guitarist, and theology Ph.D. I wrote to ask Lacy if I could visit and spend a few weeks with his team. He agreed.

AF6 had been sent to Helmand too early. The team landed at Leatherneck at 3 a.m. in late April 2009, more than a month before the main Marine force arrived. In order to have something to do, Cardinalli temporarily joined the Human Terrain Team in Maiwand, while Dunlap was briefly attached to one at Bagram, north of Kabul.

A month later, Lacy summoned them both back to Helmand, where the Marines were settling in and exciting research possibilities were beginning to open up. But right away, problems arose. The Marine colonel supervising the Human Terrain Team didn’t know what the team was supposed to do, but to be fair, neither did anyone else. Lacy and his teammates were figuring it out as they went along. AF6 had begun with four members, but one had immediately quit and returned to the States, and of the three who remained, two were women. The Marines disliked the idea of sending civilian women out on patrols in their new area. Unable to conduct the village and area assessments they had anticipated, Cardinalli and Dunlap headed to Lashkar Gah, Helmand’s capital, where the British forces weren’t afraid to work with them.

There, Cardinalli put together a report on homosexual behavior among Pashtun men, while Dunlap made herself useful advising British soldiers about the nuances of Taliban night letters. Night letters were threatening missives left in villages overnight for Afghans to find in the morning. The Taliban used them to intimidate Afghans so they wouldn’t cooperate with NATO and the Afghan government. Such letters had long been a tool of revolutionary forces in Afghanistan and Iran. They testified to the insurgents’ eerie intimacy with the villages and the countryside. In the morning, no one knew whether the letters had been left by an outsider or whether the author was one of their own.

A few days after I arrived at Leatherneck, I joined Cardinalli and a Marine unit known as Fox Company for an early-morning patrol to a cluster of compounds just outside the gates of the base. Cardinalli had olive skin, glasses, and long dark hair, which on this day she hid beneath a khaki bandanna. At Notre Dame, she had written a Ph.D. dissertation linking the musical and liturgical traditions of the Penitentes, a Catholic lay confraternity in northern New Mexico, to those of Christians, Muslims, and Jews in medieval Spain. When hijacked planes hit New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, Cardinalli had wanted to help. But given her background in music and theology, a practical role in the Global War on Terror wasn’t immediately apparent.

Nevertheless, she got to thinking about the connection between her research on the Penitentes and intelligence work. In her dissertation, she had written that the “secrecy” of the Penitentes made their communities difficult for an outsider to penetrate. Later, she would describe her dissertation research as “directly relevant to current intelligence and counterterrorism issues” and say that while working on it, she had “employed a variety of techniques typical of intelligence, investigative, and ethnographic work.” She connected her research on the Penitentes to penitential themes in Shiite Islam and served as an intelligence analyst, deploying briefly to Iraq. “Being an activist type, I had a lot of preconceptions about how the military operated,” she told me. Yet she was touched by the work U.S. soldiers were doing to improve Iraqi lives.

Cardinalli was now in the final days of an abbreviated tour as AF6’s social scientist. This morning’s patrol had grown out of a medical mission a few weeks earlier, when Cardinalli had accompanied female Marines and a female Navy doctor on a visit to the small group of houses that the Marines called Settlement 1. She had gone along on the medical mission because it offered a rare opportunity to interview Afghans in the desert around Leatherneck where few people lived. When the Navy doctor had finished talking to an Afghan family and doling out pills, Cardinalli had gotten to pose a few questions of her own, though the Afghans were not as forthcoming as she’d hoped. But the thing that struck Cardinalli most forcefully was the Navy doctor’s lack of bedside manner. The Afghans had seemed to grow visibly angry when they were handed small packets of six or eight pills. The Marines didn’t give out large quantities of medicine for good reason; they were doing all they could to prevent overdoses. But this concern struck Cardinalli as unimportant compared with the possibility that Afghans might view Americans as “stingy.”

When the military doctor told people she could only give them a small number of pills, her words “were inevitably perceived by the local residents to be a lie,” Cardinalli wrote later. Afghans “view American forces to be resource-rich and ... it is inconceivable that our supply would be so limited. Instead, local residents are forced to view the Americans with the anger of unfulfilled expectations and question the team’s motives for intruding upon their homes in order to provide something of such little benefit.”

Cardinalli wanted to make things right with the people of Settlement 1. For her followup mission, she had filled a camouflage backpack with over-the-counter cold medicine, ankle braces, Carmex lip balm, ­motion-sickness tablets, and pain relievers. She had gathered these medicines from boxes of donations outside the chaplain’s offices around base or bought them at the PX. She had no medical training beyond a brief combat first-aid course, and when she told me about the mission, I wondered what the Afghans in Settlement 1 would do with all these pills and potions with their incomprehensible English instructions.

The officer in charge of Fox Company was a 38-year-old captain named Bob McCarthy. He wore his uniform open to reveal a triangle of chest and walked with a swagger. The Marines planned to hand out child-size Crocs, knapsacks, notebooks, cooking oil, beans, and tea. Before we set out, McCarthy told Cardinalli to make sure she took time to thoroughly explain the medicines to Afghans she met. But he also cautioned that the patrol would be short—a little over two hours. Some of us climbed into a Max Pro, a giant armored vehicle, while the rest of the Marines piled into Humvees. We drove about two miles over soft dunes studded with volcanic stones and climbed down near a scattering of compounds. Cardinalli and Flo, an Afghan-American interpreter from Los Angeles, pulled out a cardboard box full of book bags and school supplies. It said “The Church of JESUS CHRIST of Latter Day Saints” on the side. “I would just watch the box,” McCarthy told them. Cardinalli stuffed it back into the truck.

She and Flo made their way to the nearest compound, where an Afghan dog, long-legged and rangy, barked at them. The man of the house had a tanned, open face, a clean beard, and dark hair under a white turban. He invited us inside. In a clean, sunlit room, Cardinalli and Flo arranged themselves on the floor across from a woman in a red sequined dress and matching headscarf. She held a baby with a blue pacifier on her lap and eight other children of varying ages clustered around her.

Cardinalli opened her bag of medicines. The Afghan man immediately assumed she was a doctor—the Marines had, after all, brought a doctor to visit his family before. He asked Cardinalli to feel his wife’s stomach, which had been hurting since she had given birth to her latest set of twins. She had borne 10 children in all, the man told us, and her stomach tissue had stretched. It hurt when she did chores around the house. They’d been told that she needed an operation, but they couldn’t afford it.

“Tell him that I’m not a doctor, but I’m a medic, a nurse,” Cardinalli told Flo. She wasn’t a medic or a nurse. She and her teammates had taken an emergency first-aid course before deployment, learning to clear an airway, bandage a bullet wound, and apply a tourniquet. “Obviously I can’t do an operation,” Cardinalli continued, “but what I can give her is things that can help relieve the pain.” She dug into her backpack and pulled out a container of Icy Hot, a cream for arthritis and joint pain. She handed it to the Afghan man. “If the tissue hurts—when it’s hurting—rub this cream on,” Cardinalli said. “It’ll feel hot at first, but then it will help the tissue. It’ll ease the pain on the inside.”

The man took the cream. The woman asked for food for her baby. Cardinalli offered them a handful of honey sticks and four strawberry protein bars from the chow hall on base, suggesting they dissolve the bars in milk. The woman said she was always in pain. Cardinalli handed her some pink tablets, a generic form of Pepto-Bismol. Flo dug into her bag and pulled out a pile of scarves. She handed them to the woman and her daughters.

Cardinalli scanned the room, gazing at the embroidery on the wall. “Her work is very beautiful,” she told the man. “Americans would pay good money for it.” She began asking questions. Where did they get their news? From Lashkar Gah, the man said. Did the woman listen to the radio? Yes, the man told her. What kind of programs did she like? Programs for women, songs with a fast beat for women to dance to. Cardinalli dutifully recorded his answers in her notebook. The woman said nothing.

When they were done, the man walked us to the door. Outside, the Marines were ornery. One of the kids had been goading the dog to bite them.

An Afghan man in a tunic and vest appeared and led us to the next compound, which lay about 500 yards away. I asked the man what he thought about the Americans. “It depends which Americans,” he said. “Some are tough and aggressive with us, and as Pashtuns we feel kind of threatened by them.”

At the next house, children swarmed the Marines. “You guys are a lot better than those other fucking brats,” the lance corporal from Texas said.

This place was poorer than the other compound, and more ragged. Eight children crowded the room where we sat. One little girl had tangled, matted hair and glassy eyes. A boy tried to grab my water bottle. The patriarch was big and unkempt, with a loud voice and a gray beard. He wore a dirty green tunic unbuttoned at the top, a white turban, and old black shoes. “Did you guys bring me dollars?” he asked Cardinalli and Flo once they were inside. “It doesn’t matter if you speak Farsi or Pashto, I just need the medicine,” he told them. “Every time I stand up I get dizzy.”

“When you stand up and get dizzy, that’s because your blood doesn’t have enough water, it doesn’t have enough fluid, so it doesn’t reach your head in time,” Cardinalli told him confidently. I had no idea what she was talking about, and the big man wasn’t listening. He asked again for medicine. The kids moved around uneasily in the shadows, where a thin, dark-haired woman sat. She had a shrill voice and a crescent tattooed on her forehead; more blue ink patterned her lower lip and chin. Cardinalli was asking the man about his ailments. She gave him two packages of cough drops, a bag of vitamin C tablets, and a tin of Carmex.

“That’s all I get?” he asked.

The woman wanted skin lotion. Cardinalli told her to rub Carmex on her face. Flo handed out Sprite, Snapple, and grapefruit juice from the base cafeteria. Cardinalli wanted to know if they had trouble sleeping. She was holding a package of motion-sickness pills. They had no problem sleeping, the man said. Cardinalli handed the woman a knee strap and an elbow band for athletic injuries.

The man wanted more. Cardinalli handed over all that was left of her plastic bag full of medicines, hurriedly explaining that he shouldn’t eat a cold pack meant for icing athletic injuries. When there was nothing more to give, they remembered the book bags and shoes in the Humvees outside. The man wanted those, too. He walked them out. A few cornstalks grew in front of the house. Cardinalli asked what he did for work.

“I don’t do anything,” the man said. “No food, no water. We just grow a few things here

“Does he have any other training or education?” she asked Flo.

The man ignored the question. “Tell these Americans not to destroy our country,” he told Flo.

The man’s children had streamed out with us, and now I watched them grab the schoolbags and shoes

“Some people really get the idea about self-sustainment,” Cardinalli said, “and some don’t.” She turned to the Afghan man. “What do the ladies do mostly during the day?” she asked hopefully. “How do they spend the day?”

“There’s nothing to do,” the man said.

“Do they have any hobbies or talents, like sewing?”

He waved the question away. When he was gone, I told Cardinalli what he had said about the Americans destroying his country.

“They live in the security that we provide. They moved here because of us,” Cardinalli said testily. “So we’re destroying their country!”

We climbed back into the Max Pro. “It just sucks the life out of you, doesn’t it?” Cardinalli asked me. “You end up kind of—sad.”

She was not wrong about the complicated, parasitic relationship between the Afghans of Settlement 1 and the foreign troops who had taken up residence in Helmand. A trickle of mostly transitory Afghans—nomads, internally displaced people, returning refugees—had settled on the unwelcoming dirt around the American and British bases. Some undoubtedly hoped to benefit from their newfound proximity to foreigners, but the nature of that benefit was mixed. On the way back to Leatherneck, we stopped at a compound next to a stand of green vegetation. The plants were rooted in blackish mud, and a cornfield stretched along one side of the property. It was the only cultivated area in a sea of desert.

“This is the compound that flourishes from shit runoff,” someone announced. I looked around and saw a dark stream. The Afghans were growing vegetables in the sewage runoff from the nearby military bases.

“We’ve told him about the health risks,” one of the Marines said. “He moved here because of it. Says it’s good fertilizer.”

On the way back to the base, I asked a sergeant whether he thought giving out Crocs, notebooks, beans, and tea could sway local opinion about the Americans.

“Some of them like us, some of them don’t,” he told me. “I really don’t know if we’ve had much effect changing people’s minds.”

He was right. When Lacy and I stopped by Fox Company’s tent the following afternoon, we learned that a military convoy had hit a buried bomb just south of the second compound Cardinalli had visited; the Marines had found two other explosives buried in the road nearby. It was likely that the old man in the compound had seen the insurgents burying the bomb near his house, or at least heard about it. He had taken everything Cardinalli had to give, but he had said nothing to warn the Americans.

A fresh Human Terrain Team showed up at Leatherneck a few days later. AF7 was bound for Camp Dwyer, another base in Helmand. One morning, I found the new arrivals seated in a semicircle around AF6 team member Dunlap, who was briefing them about the area. The team’s two social scientists, a fresh-faced young woman and a slight man in a black mock turtleneck, leaned in. A female Army major sat next to a young man in a T-shirt. The team leader, a silver-haired retired Marine officer, stood listening. Dunlap was telling them about the pro-NATO night letters she’d written for the British psychological operations guys.

“What are night letters?” one of the new team members asked.

Patiently, Dunlap explained.

The social scientist in the turtleneck spoke up. “Why don’t they just put it in the mailbox,” he asked, “rather than hang it up somewhere and see if they see it?”

Dunlap paused, unsure how to respond. “It’s traditional,” she finally said. “It’s like a proclamation. This is the way they pass messages to the community.”

AF7 had arrived at the beginning of a long-awaited troop surge in one of the most important parts of the country for the U.S. military, and they didn’t know that mailboxes were all but obsolete in Afghanistan. Cardinalli had handed out Icy Hot to a woman with a medical condition that stemmed from having given birth to 10 children in a country with dismal health care and a soaring maternal mortality rate. Was this really the best we could do?

A FEW months before my visit to Helmand, Marine Corps Maj. Ben Connable had written that the Human Terrain System was a flimsy and transitory undertaking that devoured scarce resources yet was ill-equipped to meet the military’s crying long-term need for better cultural intelligence. An Arabic speaker, Connable had served in Iraq and seen firsthand the consequences of Americans’ paltry understanding of the people they were trying to win over. But he believed servicemen and servicewomen were smart and capable enough to learn this stuff on their own. They didn’t need to outsource it to civilians. The military ought to take the problem seriously enough to invest in a durable, long-term solution, he argued. The Human Terrain System was just an expensive distraction.

Connable had a point, but the main problem with the Human Terrain System was much more basic: about half the Human Terrain Team members I met over 18 months in Afghanistan should never have been there. AF6 managed some modest accomplishments, but none of the Human Terrain Team members at Camp Leatherneck had the kind of expertise that field commanders told me they were looking for. Because the Marines in charge at Leatherneck didn’t know what the Human Terrain Team was meant to accomplish, the team members did whatever they could, and whatever came up. Dunlap wrote night letters for the British psy-ops team because that was where she felt most able to contribute and where her contributions were most appreciated. Cardinalli’s report on homosexuality among Pashtun men was used by a Marine intelligence sergeant to shame a young man he was questioning.

Lacy found that the only way he could gain traction within the Marine command culture in Helmand was by meeting the operational needs of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which in the fall of 2009 was primarily concerned with the impending invasion of Marja, a small farming community that had become a getaway zone for insurgents fleeing other parts of the province. That fall, a Marine officer asked Lacy to begin collecting cultural information and “open source intelligence” in preparation for the invasion of Marja. In a September 30 field report, Lacy detailed his interview with an Afghan police sergeant and landowner from the northern area of Marja, who identified the location of his home there and of a onetime police checkpoint, both of which had been taken over by insurgents.

The Afghan marked the areas inhabited by several Pashtun subtribes, but he also supplied the name of the Taliban commander who had moved into his house and allegedly turned it into a bomb factory. The report included grid coordinates for important places in Marja, including the home of a local leader who had been killed by the Taliban; the home of an elder that had been occupied by the Taliban; a gas station used by insurgents “for refueling and as a gathering place”; and a Taliban checkpoint on the road to Lashkar Gah, “where the Taliban are reported to collect taxes from local residents.” The source supplied the radio call sign for a Taliban commander who controlled most of eastern Marja and pointed out a minefield and a bridge rigged with explosives that the insurgents planned to use against ISAF forces. He also described the location of an insurgent campsite, a cemetery, a cellphone tower, several mosques, a school, and a number of key traffic intersections.

This was not the sort of cultural information the Human Terrain System had told commanders and the public it would be gathering; it sounded more like the Phoenix Program in Vietnam than a gentle effort to learn about local people. But this was exactly the kind of information the Marines wanted. “They have a hard time, any of these guys, distinguishing sociocultural information from intel,” Lacy told me. “To them, it’s all the same stuff, and in a way, it is. Quite frankly, intelligence, by doctrine, is not supposed to be just classified stuff.”

By late 2009, the American Anthropological Association had conducted its own study of the Human Terrain System and concluded, correctly, that the teams were not doing anthropology. The distinction was important, but it didn’t assuage the anger many anthropologists felt toward Montgomery McFate and her enterprise. Too many people still thought of the Human Terrain System as “that military-anthropology program,” and too many press accounts still described it that way. The program had encouraged this confusion, even fed on it. In doing so, one anthropologist told me, the Human Terrain System had “set the relationship between anthropology and the government back 40 years.”

WAR IS a form of hysteria to which no industry is more susceptible than defense contracting. Suddenly there is money for everything, but political will is fickle and Congress is mercurial. Manufacturers and program developers must move quickly before the funding dries up. The moment calls for speed, and speed calls for cutting corners.

The Human Terrain System had grown too fast. “We thought we had five teams and two years to build them, and it turned out we had to build 26 teams immediately,” McFate told me. “It was kind of catastrophic.” Recruitment was shoddy, and there were no systems in place to handle training and deploying so many teams. But the massive, heavy gears of the Pentagon had already begun to turn. Soldiers were dying, and the Army wanted what it wanted, and wanted it now.

I met colonels and generals who talked about the Human Terrain System as if it were the best thing that had ever happened to the Army. Mike Flynn, a sharp, contrarian general who served as the chief of NATO intelligence, published a paper in January 2010 calling for “sweeping changes to the way the intelligence community thinks about itself—from a focus on the enemy to a focus on the people of Afghanistan.” Because the U.S. military had directed most of its intelligence efforts at insurgents, the intelligence community “still finds itself unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which we operate and the people we are trying to protect and persuade,” Flynn and his coauthors wrote.

“We thought we had five teams and two years to build them, and it turned out we had to build 26 teams immediately,” McFate says. “It was kind of catastrophic.”

Human Terrain Teams could help solve this problem, Flynn believed. He called them an “extraordinary capability.” “Whoever had that idea was a genius,” he told me. What made the teams so valuable was precisely the fact that many of their members weren’t “intel people,” by which Flynn meant collectors or analysts who had spent their whole lives narrowly focusing on the enemy. “They’re different and they’re willing to take the risk,” Flynn told me. “And these are people that absolutely have much better things to do, but they decided that they want to serve.”

Did the people staffing Human Terrain Teams have much better things to do? Some did and some didn’t. Some were bright, driven, talented people who contributed useful insights—but an equal number of unqualified people threatened to turn the whole effort into a joke. The Human Terrain System—which had been described in the pages of military journals and briefed to commanders in glowing, best-case-scenario terms—was ultimately a complex mix of brains and ambition, idealism and greed, idiocy, optimism, and bad judgment. “The problem with the Human Terrain System,” Fondacaro told me, “is that we have too many humans.”

But the problem with the Human Terrain System was bigger than that: it had everything to do with the contradiction between the United States’ self-image as a benevolent superpower and the realities of war and the economy that drives it. By 2012, the Human Terrain System had cost U.S. taxpayers more than $600 million. Today, the program continues under new management (though only 14 field teams remain in Afghanistan, and none in Iraq). Last month, the Human Terrain System’s current recruitment and hiring contractor, CGI Federal, was handed an additional $45 million for work related to the program.

The Army fired Fondacaro from his job as program manager in 2010, but in more optimistic times, he had spoken of the Human Terrain System as a kind of mini–State Department within the Defense Department. In fact, the program was a giant cultural metaphor, a cosmic expression of the national zeitgeist: American exceptionalism tempered by the political correctness of a postcolonial, globalized age and driven by the ravenous hunger of defense contractors for profit. If you could have found a way to project on a big screen the nation’s mixed feelings about its role as the sole superpower in a post–Cold War world, this was what it would have looked like.

Towards the end of 2008, the results of the research project México Indígena (Indigenous Mexico) were handed over to two Zapotec communities in the Sierra Juárez in the form of maps. Research had been undertaken two years earlier by a team of geographers from University of Kansas. What initially seemed to be a beneficial project for the communities now leaves many of the participants feeling like victims of geopiracy.

In August 2006, the México Indígena research team arrived at the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO, S.C.) to present research objectives and garner support to commence work in the Sierra Juárez region. At the time, the team included a Mexican biologist Gustavo Ramírez, an Ixtlán native well known in the area, who was responsible for initially approaching UNOSJO.

Project leader and geographer Peter Herlihy explained the project objectives to UNOSJO, S.C., initially stating that it was to document the impacts PROCEDE [a Mexican Government program] has had on indigenous communities. He failed to mention, however, that this research prototype was financed by the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) of the United States Army and that reports on his work would be handed directly to this Office. Herlihy neglected to mention this despite being expressly asked to clarify the eventual use of the data obtained through research.

Herlihy mentioned that his team would collaborate with the following organizations: the American Geographical Society (AGS), Kansas University, Kansas State University, Carleton University, the Universidad Autónoma de San Luis Potosí and the Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT). He failed, however, to acknowledge the participation of Radiance Technologies, a company that specializes in arms development and military intelligence.

Although UNOSJO, S.C. participated in some of the México Indígena Project’s initial activities, the organization soon ceased participation due to unclear project intentions. The Santa Cruz Yagavila and Santa María Zoogochi communities also ended up feeling the same distrust and they too abandoned the Project. For these reasons, the México Indígena research team localized activities within the San Miguel Tiltepec and San Juan Yagila communities, both located in the Zapotec region known as El Rincón de la Sierra Juárez.

In November 2008, México Indígena members Peter Herlihy and John Kelly attended a meeting of the UCC, the Unión de Comunidades Cafetaleras “Unidad Progreso y Trabajo” (the Union of Coffee-Producing Communities “Unity, Progress and Work”), held in the community of Santa Cruz Yagavila. They announced the completion of the Yagila and Tiltepec community maps and offered their services to other organization-member communities. They went on to mention that research had been carried out with the collaboration of UNOSJO, S.C.’s own Aldo Gonzalez, a fact that was immediately refuted.

Following the aforementioned UCC meeting, UNOSJO, S.C. began looking into the México Indígena Project. Investigation revealed that México Indígena forms part of the Bowman Expeditions, a more extensive geographic research project backed and financed by the FMSO, among other institutions. The FMSO inputs information into a global database that forms an integral part of the Human Terrain System (HTS), a United States Army counterinsurgency strategy designed by FMSO and applied within indigenous communities, among others.

Since 2006 the Human Terrain System HTS has, since 2006, been employed with military purposes in both Afghanistan and Iraq and according to what we have been able to determine Bowman Expeditions are underway in Mexico, the Antilles, Colombia and Jordan.

In November 2008, the México Indígena Project completed the maps corresponding to Zapotec communities San Miguel Tiltepec and San Juan Yagila. Contrary to the often-mentioned promise of transparency, México Indígena created an English-only web page, a language that the participating communities do not understand. Before the communities received the work, said maps had already been published on the Internet. Furthermore, the communities were never informed that reports detailing the project would be handed over to the FMSO.

In addition to publishing the maps, the México Indígena team created a database into which pertinent information was entered: community member names and the associated geographic location of their plot(s) of land, formal and informal use of the land and other data that cannot be accessed via the Internet.

According to statements made by those heading the México Indígena research team, this type of map can be used in multiple ways. They did not specify, however, whether they would be employed for commercial, military or other purposes. Furthermore, as the maps are compatible with Google Earth, practically anyone can gain access to the information. Yet only community members can decipher information expressed in Zapotec (toponyms), unless, of course, one has the capacity to translate them, as in the case of FMSO linguistic specialists.

UNOSJO, S.C. is against this kind of project being carried out in the Sierra Juárez and distances itself completely from the work compiled by the México Indígena research team. We call upon indigenous peoples in this country and around the world not to be fooled by these types of research projects, which usurp traditional knowledge without prior consent. Although researchers may initially claim to be conducting the projects in “good faith”, said knowledge could be used against the indigenous peoples in the future.

We hereby demand that Peter Herlihy honor his promise of transparency and that the Mexican public be made aware all his sources of funding and the institutions that received information on findings obtained in the communities.

We further demand that, in light of these facts, the Mexican Government, firstly the Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources for having financed part of the research, as well as the Department of Internal Affairs, the Department of External Affairs, Deputies and Senators for possible violations of the Indigenous Peoples’ National Sovereignty and Autonomy, clarify its position on the matter.

“The Road To Hell”

$500,000 in Department of Defense Funding to Kansas University for Mapping of Communally Held Indigenous Lands in La Huasteca and Oaxaca, Mexico

by Simón Sedillo November 26th, 2007

$500,000 in Department of Defense funding is being made available to the Department of Geography by the Foreign Military Services Office (FMSO), based out of Fort Leavenworth in Lawrence, Kansas. Geography professors Jerome Dobson and Peter Herlihy explicitly acknowledge the security and intelligence ramifications of their project, the Bowman Expeditions, citing the geo-political and cultural effects of the “neo-liberal property regime.” The home of the FMSO, Fort Leavenworth, was the command center of the western front during US expansionism into native lands in the early 1800s as well as the epicenter of the War Departments “control” over native populations after the civil war. Today, the FMSO focuses on emerging and asymmetric threats to the national security of the United States of America, which is a red flag as to their intentions in funding the Bowman Expeditions.

US military intervention in Mexico has seen a steady increase in the last decade, and now is set on a fast track through Plan Mexico, which like Plan Colombia, justifies further military funding for the “war on drugs.” The racist history of colonial rule and territorial occupation continues with a whole new set of conspirators seeking economic gain and academic notoriety. The maps produced by this project are not just of the physical landscape, but rather more intentionally of the cultural resistance to displacement. Through the rhetoric of unbiased science, and geographic exploration, the Bowman expeditions are actively paving in Mexico, the road to hell.

• The prototype for the Bowman Expeditions already is under way in the remote regions of Mexico.

• The research is supported by more than $500,000 from the Department of Defense through the Foreign Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth. It involves researchers from KU, Kansas State and institutions in Canada and Mexico.

• The teams are tracing the transfer of property from communal “ejido” lands to private property, a process legalized by a change in the Mexican Constitution in 1992.

• Program Co-Director Peter Herlihy believes the PROCEDE, the Program for Certification of Ejidal Rights and Titling of Urban Patios, has caused a silent revolution. “I would say this is the most significant land tenure change in any Latin American country since colonial times,” he said.

• The researchers have traveled to La Huasteca in the state of San Luis Potosí and Oaxaca. They have taught the residents cartography and used their knowledge to develop maps of the area. Theyre gathering information about property, demographics and who buys and who sells each parcel of land. They share what they gather with the residents, but Herlihy also sees other uses for the information. Much of the ejido land is forested, he said, thus the fate of the land has implications for environmental conservation. And the land changes also affect immigration, he said

• Geoff Demarest, bureau Americas analyst in the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, said he hopes to see more projects like the one in Mexico. And a second team is planned to conduct research in the Antilles. “We live in a world where we’re now admitting that the knowledge base upon which the government makes decisions could be improved,” Demarest said.

Quoting the Mexico based project website for the Bowman Expeditions, “Mexico Indigena” at:

• In 2005, University of Kansas geographers Jerome Dobson and Peter Herlihy began an international collaboration with the American Geographical Society, the US Foreign Military Studies Office, and the Mexican Universidad Autnoma de San Luis Potosí (UASLP) to bring together students and faculty from four universities in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to create a comprehensive national-level geographic information system (GIS) database that focuses on how neoliberal changes in Mexico’s property regime will affect indigenous culture and land use.

• Project PI Jerry Dobson conceived the broad idea of the project because he, like many others, was troubled over US intelligence failures and related conflicts around the globe.

• The prototype research project, called México Indígena, is directed by Co-PI Peter Herlihy, and demonstrates how good old fashioned regional geography can be re-tooled with digital technologies and humanistic methodologies. Dobson’s notion was embraced and supported by the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) in nearby Fort Leavenworth from the start.

• The research team’s two goals were: 1) to develop a prototype for obtaining, interpreting and presenting current geographic information on a country from open source, publicly-available GIS data of all kinds; and 2) to determine, develop, and further research a topic having a significant connection to security and defense issues. Indigenous land tenure and radical neo-liberal property regime changes are the specific topic the project team has explored while constructing a broader GIS of Mexico.

• The project team is clear, on the one hand, that no single template can reflect the differences existing between the research conditions found in one country and those in another. On the other hand, the team believes that their experiences in implementing the first FMSO global GIS place-based field research project can provide useful guidance for structuring future projects, helping insure the success of the broader FMSO program to extend these projects around the globe. It truly is worth the investment!

Dobson claims that he is aware of the implications of the technical advances of his science with regards to what he calls geoslavery, or the abuse of geographic data to control populations, yet he contradicts himself in his own public defense of this science, claiming the need for more geography in the intelligence community. Dobson convinced the Department of Defense to fund the Bowman Expeditions with the intelligence and security implications in mind. As a geographer, Dobson must be very aware of the dangers of this information in the hands of military officials wishing to quell popular resistance to US corporate and political interests in Mexico. Cultural geography, unlike sociology, acknowledges with no objectivity the clear pitfalls of capitalist imperialism, and its detrimental effect on indigenous farm-working communities throughout the global south. If this were just a geographical survey of a cultural phenomenon to aid a community in surviving neo-liberalism intact then we could all applaud Dobson’s efforts, but his funding source exposes a more sinister monster behind his scientific rhetoric.

From the School of the Americas to Forth Leavenworth

Fort Benning Columbus, Georgia

This November 16th and 17th, the 18th annual vigil at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia was held. The SOA, renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, is infamous for training Latin American militaries in “counter-insurgency tactics.” The School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) has been organizing the vigils for the last 18 years to protest a number of atrocities, which the SOA has been directly linked to, among them the murder of 4 American Catholic nuns, Arch-Bishop Oscar Romero, and 6 Jesuit Priests all in El Salvador. The SOAW website includes declassified copies of training manuals used at the SOA, which include unlawful and immoral counter-insurgency tactics such as rape, kid-napping, disappearance, torture, political and media manipulation, as well as propaganda. Vigil organizers list Argentina – Bolivia – Brazil – Chile – Colombia – El Salvador – Guatemala – Haiti – Honduras – Mexico – Peru – Paraguay and Uruguay as some of the countries, which have SOA graduates. The SOAW links major human rights violations to SOA graduates. Vigil organizers have always insisted that the SOA is not the only school of this sort, and that other military institutions throughout the US and the world may very well be engaged in similar training tactics.

One example is Fort Huachuca, in the state of Arizona. Since 2004, there have been allegations that Fort Huachaca has been linked to the teaching of abuse or torture techniques that were used in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. In October 2007, two Roman Catholic priests were sentenced to 5 months imprisonment for having knelt in prayer inside the installation after authorities refused to accept a letter from them making a link between Fort Huachaca and torture training. (TortureOnTrial.org)

Though the SOA is most notable for training soldiers from Central and South America, the school has shown a steady increase in Mexican graduates. SOAW.org states: “The sudden rise in Mexican graduates corresponds to the growing movement for economic justice in Mexico. In the first 49 years of the School, Mexico sent very few students 766 totalto be trained at the SOA. That number escalated sharply in 1996 and rose to 333 students in 1997, 1,177 in 1998 and close to 700 in 1999.”

“The School of the Americas is part of a larger project to protect and defend U.S. corporate interests in Mexico at the expense of workers and indigenous peoples. The movement to close the School of the Americas is an important expression of solidarity with the Mexican people.” Eduardo Diaz, Mexican labor leader.

Fort Leavenworth Lawrence, Kansas

For 30 years, Fort Leavenworth was the chief base of operations on the Indian frontier. During the Mexican American War, Fort Leavenworth was the outfitting post for the Army of the West. For three decades following the Civil War, Fort Leavenworth was the epicenter of the War departments control of the Native American population.

Today, the Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) is a research and analysis center under the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, Deputy Chief of Staff G-2 (Intelligence). FMSO manages and operates the Ft. Leavenworth Joint Reserve Intelligence Center (JRIC) and conducts analytical programs focused on emerging and asymmetric threats, regional military and security developments, and other issues that define evolving operational environments around the world.

In allotting over $500,000 in DOD funding, funneled directly through the Foreign Military Studies Office, to map communally held indigenous lands, it is clear that the DOD is identifying Mexico as a staging ground for emerging and asymmetric threats. What is curious however, is that The Bowman Expedition’s initial focus in the Huasteca, has now shifted to Oaxaca, as opposed to one of the states which have outspoken armed insurgencies taking place, such as Chiapas and Guerrero. The LJ World article states, “The teams are tracing the transfer of property from communal “ejido” lands to private property, a process legalized by a change in the Mexican Constitution in 1992.” The fact is that, in 1992, then Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari broke Mexican federal law by revoking Article 27 of the Mexican constitution. Article 27 established permanent communal (ejido) land grants to Mexico’s 10 million indigenous peoples.

These land grants were not reservations, but large parcels of land fought for by the indigenous during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 under the auspices of Emiliano Zapata. Gortari revoked article 27, effectively privatizing these communally held lands in preparation for the necessary structural adjustments imposed by the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In the eyes of the Mexican federal government, as well as Canadian and US officials, these communally held lands had to be privatized in order to allow for “foreign investment” and the deregulation of natural resource exploitation. The rhetoric used by the Mexican program PROCEDE, the Program for Certification of Ejidal Rights and Titling of Urban Patios, to convince indigenous farmers to allow these lands to be privatized, was that now, for the first time, farmers would have a title to their land, and could do with it as they wished. Immediately after the revocation of article 27, several less than silent revolutions began to brew throughout indigenous communities in Mexico. Most notably are the armed uprisings in Chiapas, by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) and in Guerrero by the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR). These two, as well as other armed and unarmed groups, responded to the privatization of communal lands on several grounds.

The granting of land titles was not intended to liberate the land for the people to own and control, but rather to pave a path towards indigenous communities selling their traditional lands and handing them to foreign investors. Before the revocation of article 27 the Mexican federal government would engage more blatantly in the use of military force and state sponsored brutality to displace communities from land wealthy in natural resources or of strategic importance to the US political economy. The signing of NAFTA would put the world’s eyes on Mexico and therefore would require new, and more creative methods of community displacement, land grabbing and natural resource exploitation. First off, with land titles, indigenous farmers who were once bound by their communities to keep and work lands for and by their indigenous peoples, could now be persuaded to sell these lands. Yet privatizations would not be enough to persuade sufficient numbers of farmers to give up their livelihood and traditions.

Therefore, a second and more insidiously neo-colonial aspect of PROCEDE is the granting of overlapping land titles to neighboring communities or tribes, which if they were not already feuding over territorial limits, they most certainly would begin to feud now. PROCEDEs exacerbation of existing feuds and the creation of new feuds over territorial limits would not satisfy the need for communally held lands to be made available for foreign investment. This brings us back to the role of the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth in Lawrence, Kansas, and to the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, in Columbus, Georgia.

The rhetoric behind the role of the North American Free Trade Agreement was that of democratization, therefore the use of the military to enforce the necessary structural adjustments and land displacements in order to prepare Mexico for its bright new future, as a “developing” nation, would no longer be openly palatable. The role of the Foreign Military Services Office in identifying “emerging and asymmetric” threats in Oaxaca, Mexico is chilling to say the least. Fort Leavenworth has a vast array of knowledge with regards to how neo-liberal changes in Mexico’s property regime will affect indigenous culture and land use. As an outpost for the western expansion into native lands for over thirty years, and as an epicenter for the “control” of the native peoples, the military base must have acquired some knowledge on the political, economic, social, cultural, psychological and spiritual effects of displacing indigenous peoples from their land, by any means.

The Greatest Threat to the Security of the United States of America

There is nothing surprising about the involvement of the Foreign Military Services Office (FMSO) in assessing emerging and asymmetric threats to the United States neo-liberal agenda around the world. However, what is striking here, is what the FMSO qualifies as an emerging or asymmetric threat. In general, asymmetric threats are terrorist groups, or armed insurgent groups, but the FMSO’s extension of the classification of “asymmetric” to “emerging”, encompasses much more than terrorist and armed insurgent groups. The extension of asymmetric to emerging, inherently includes social movements themselves as threats; the Oaxacan Peoples Popular Assembly (APPO), its member communities and organizations being no exception.

So what is it that is so threatening about social movements in Oaxaca to the United States? The same thing that was so threatening about Native Americans resisting displacement from their lands by force to meet the needs of the growing white settler population. The popular social movement within the APPO, its communities, and its member organizations is indigenous at its root. Over 3/5 of Oaxaca’s municipalities are governed by traditional indigenous methods of self-governance. These methods of government pre-exist communism, anarchism, socialism, democracy, and any of the other Eurocentric political ideals which dominate the geopolitical landscape of our world today. The traditional forms of government delineated by the indigenous principles of unity and resistance, which were synthesized by the Zapatista National Liberation Army, permeate throughout Mesoamerica, and not just Chiapas.

The Zapatistas presented the world with seven of these principles, and left the notion of them, as a guiding path towards the rediscovery of other “lost” Mesoamerican principles. In June of 2006, at the onset of a popular uprising in Oaxaca, Mexico, the APPO made clear to the world that they too would aspire to these principles as the foundation of their proposed popular assembly, declaring publicly, as the EZLN’s Sub-Comandante Marcos had years earlier, that the APPO would “lead by obeying.”

The greatest threat to the neo-liberal political economy is not terrorism, nor armed insurgency, nor drugs. It has always been and continues to be, grassroots community based organizing for self-sufficiency, self-reliance, self-determination, self-empowerment, and self-defense. In Mexico, as throughout the growing popular movements brewing all over Latin America, this type of organizing can be broken down to just one word: “autogestion.” Autogestion is the greatest threat to neo-liberalism, and its benefits to the American people. When communities whose role within the neo-liberal political economy is that of a slave, a servant or worse yet, a disposable variable, begin to organize for self-sufficiency, self-reliance, self-determination, self-empowerment, and self-defense, that is the greatest threat to the security of the United States of America. In fact it is the only thing that has ever truly been considered a threat.

To have a blatant military response to this type of threat has become less and less workable for the United States, and during the 80s and 90s the US government has exponentially increased strategies for low intensity warfare in order to erode the support base of popular social movements who challenge the neo-liberal political economy. Today, as the US did in Colombia, President Bush is requesting additional anti-narcotics funding for Mexico through “Plan Mexico“, dubbed the “Merida Initiative” to avoid the negative connotations associated with the absolutely unsuccessful Plan Colombia. Again the threat to US corporate interests in Mexico, as in Colombia, are not drugs or drug dealers, but popular resistance to land displacements. In the case of Mexico, the Mexican military becomes the executer of US military operations in Mexico, receiving 80% of its financing and training support directly from the US government. The Mexican military then outsources brutality to the Mexican Federal Preventive Police and the various paramilitary forces found throughout the Mexican territory including, but not limited to, vigilante groups, trained death squads, and militarized civilians carrying out atrocities disguised as agrarian land disputes.

A profoundly depressing part of the story is how many Americans would be “surprised to hear” that this is “still going on.” Worse yet, are the “good intentions” of academics who like to play at sciences without really evaluating the consequences of their research. In 2002, one Oaxacan farmer asked and expressed to me: “Do Americans really think that the peace, comfort, tranquility, and prosperity they enjoy today has come about without grave consequences to the communities whose back, sweat, and blood has been and continues to be used to fuel this machine? Do Americans not realize that their peace, is our terror? And if they did, would they care?”

U.S. army’s geo-piracy in Oaxacan communities condemned

Oaxaca, Mexico.- Several officials from communities in the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca condemned the geo-piracy carried out by experts from the U.S. army under the cover of supposed scientific research.

They explained that at the end of 2008 the mapped results of an investigation called México Indígena, started two years earlier by a team of geographers from the University of Kansas, were handed over to two Zapotec communities in the Sierra Juárez. What appeared to be a beneficial project for the communities has now left many of the participants with the feeling of being the victims of an act of geo-piracy.

In an assembly in the community of San Juan Yagila on July 24, 2011 in the meeting room of the town hall, the victims said that, “After having reflected upon what happened in the communities of San Juan Yagila and San Miguel Tiltepec in 2006 when the México Indígena project was carried out, which formed part of the global project called the Bowman Expeditions, promoted by the American Geographical Society and the Foreign Military Studies Office belonging to the U.S. Army, we state the following:”

Below is the full text of the statement:

Xidza Declaration Regarding Geo-Piracy

We, the undersigned, Municipal Authorities and Commissioners of Communal Lands from the communities of San Juan Tepanzacoalco, Santa María Zoogochi, Santa Cruz Yagavila, Santiago Teotlaxco and San Juan Yagila, meeting in the community of San Juan Yagila on July 24, 2011 in the town hall meeting room, after having reflected upon what happened in the communities of San Juan Yagila and San Miguel Tiltepec in 2006 when the México Indígena project was carried out, which formed part of the global project called the Bowman Expeditions, promoted by the American Geographical Society and the Foreign Military Studies Office belonging to the U.S. Army, state the following:

• We do not agree with the manner in which the geographical studies were carried out in the communities of San Juan Yagila and San Miguel Tiltepec by the México Indígena project team between the years of 2006 and 2008, because they did not inform these communities as to the origins of the resources they used to carry out this research, specifically concealing the participation of the U.S. Army, and in this way violating the right to free, previous and informed consent which for us as indigenous communities is recognized in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; as well, we support both of the communities in any problems they may have later on as a result of these investigations.

• We declare the creation of a single, organized front amongst the communities in our region, known as the Rincón de Ixtlán.

• We will seek to acquire the necessary information regarding the pros and cons of governmental and non-governmental projects and programs which are offered to our communities, with the aim that before deciding to accept them or not, the principle of free, previous and informed consent is applied.

• We demand that our communities are paid, in an unconditional and compensatory manner, sufficient economic resources for the conservation of the forests that exist in them, as it is proven that it is the indigenous communities who have conserved the forests and jungles of Mexico, as well, that this be done with public resources, so as to not fall into the hands of transnational businesses who are only interested in profiting from our lands and to wash themselves of their blame for the climate crisis which they have caused on the planet.

U.S. Military Funded Mapping Project in Oaxaca

Geographers used to gather intelligence?

War was God's way of teaching Americans geography," once wrote Ambrose Bierce, an American journalist and social critic. Today, a University of Kansas (KU) professor may be using geography to teach Americans war.

Dr. Jerome Dobson, a geography professor and president of the American Geographical Society (AGS), sent out a one-and-a-half page white paper sometime in late 2004-early 2005 to the Department of Defense and civilian agencies looking for funding to promote a $125 million "academic" project that would send geographers to countries all over the globe to conduct fieldwork.

"The greatest shortfall in foreign intelligence facing the nation is precisely the kind of understanding that geographers gain through field experience, and there's no reason that it has to be classified information," wrote Dobson. "The best and cheapest way the government could get most of this intelligence would be to fund AGS to run a foreign fieldwork grant program covering every nation on earth."

This fieldwork program, named the Bowman Expeditions, was enthusiastically received by Dr. Geoffrey Demarest, a former Lieutenant Colonel and current Latin America specialist at the U.S. Army's Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO). The FMSO is a research center housed at Fort Leavenworth, about 50 miles down the road from KU. According to its website, FMSO "conducts analytical programs focused on emerging and asymmetric threats, regional military and security developments, and other issues that define evolving operational environments around the world." Demarest, a School of the Americas graduate who served multiple assignments in Latin America during his 23-year military career, has written extensively about counterinsurgency and believes mapping and property rights are necessary tools to advance U.S. security strategies, such as with Plan Colombia. He helped secure a $500,000 grant to partially fund México Indígena, the first Bowman Expedition, which until recently has been quietly mapping indigenous lands in Oaxaca, Mexico.

In January, a communiqué sent out by the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO) alleged that the project was carried out without obtaining free, prior, and informed consent of local communities as mandated by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. UNOSJO also questioned whether the project, which in addition to the involvement of the U.S. military office that runs the controversial Human Terrain System, involves the participation of Radiance Technologies—a weapons development and intelligence company that could in the future use the information collected to the detriment of the local population in terms of counter-insurgency, bio-piracy, or the privatization of land.

The communiqué generated a confined hurricane of criticism on Internet sites and listservs (and a flurry of articles in Oaxaca daily newspapers). But when reports of the conflict starting appearing on international media outlets like Pravda and Seoul Times, project directors Dobson and fellow KU professor Peter Herlihy (lead geographer for México Indígena) were prompted to defend the ethics, purpose, and scope of their projects.

"Because the Foreign Military Studies Office has been one of several sponsors of the first Bowman Expedition México Indígena," they wrote on the México Indígena website to address "misconceptions" on the project, "there has been some understandable confusion regarding the project's aims.... FMSO's goal is to help increase an understanding of the world's cultural terrain, so that the U.S. government may avoid the enormously costly mistakes which it has made due in part to a lack of such understanding."

On the gathering controversy in Mexico, they stated, "The México Indígena team is well aware that some people are suspicious of the fact that FMSO is one of its sponsors. We ask only that such potential critics keep an open mind, that they learn a little about what we really do, and that they reconsider their assumption that any action which involves any part of the U.S. government must necessarily be bad." These words only added fuel to the fire.

Community on Fire

In a small rural Zapotec community deep in the distinctly isolated Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca, southern Mexico, a regional gathering of indigenous peoples' autonomy took place from February 21 to 23. The 3rd Feria of the Cornfield-Globalization and the Natural Resources of the Sierra, convened by the UNOSJO coordination, drew together a couple of hundred local attendees to consolidate the ongoing process of autonomy and present a showcase of indigenous corn-based culture and food sovereignty. But the burning topic of the mapping controversy seemed to overshadow other discussions.

"We made it very clear that we don't want anyone mapping around here," said Juan Perez Luna, community leader of the host village, Asuncion Lachixila. "Yes, we want to map our own communities and, yes, we want to learn how to do it, but we don't believe what these (México Indígena) geographers were saying." Don Juan, an elderly grandfather who attended the gathering, was straightforward with his thoughts on the project: "We think these studies are about counter-insurgency."

The U.S. geographers promoting the México Indígena project first approached UNOSJO in 2006, as if recognizing the NGO as the informal conduit to the Zapotec communities. This coincided with the development of the popular social movements in Oaxaca that gave birth to the Oaxacan Peoples Popular Assembly (APPO) and a dynamic new kind of popular uprising marked by horizontal organizational structures and militant non-violent direct action. APPO seized the city of Oaxaca for seven months in what become known as the Oaxaca Commune, often mobilizing as many as a half-million citizens in support of their revolutionary demands. The state, unfamiliar with how to deal with this kind of social unrest (no obvious leaders to arrest, disappear, assassinate) repeatedly failed to quell the uprising and eventually sent over 5,000 members of the Policía Federal Preventiva (PFP), Mexico's heavily armed federal military-police force, to retake the city. The violent counter-offensive led to several deaths and hundreds of arrests, and was followed by intense repression against the social movement.

Indigenous communities across the Oaxaca state, representing the poorest and most oppressed segment of the population, sided with the inclusive social movement. The Zapotec communities of the Sierras threw their weight behind the APPO, supporting its demands for indigenous autonomy.

"Indigenous peoples' demand for land tenancy and territorial autonomy challenge Mexico's neoliberal policies—and democracy itself," wrote Professors Dobson and Herlihy in a July 2008 article published in the Geographical Review ("A Digital Geography of Indigenous Mexico: Prototype for AGS Bowman Expeditions"). This overtly political observation contrasts strikingly with Dobson's February 5 written response to the growing controversy around his project, where he claimed "our team's abiding dedication to the indigenous people of Oaxaca and our neutrality in all things political."

"UNOSJO have been showing how Dobson, or better said, the U.S. military authorities who are behind the mapping project, have an interest in the privatization of communally held lands," explained Aldo González, director of the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juárez. "Throughout their mapping investigations, they are seeking to understand the communities' resistance to privatization and identify mechanisms to force them to join PROCEDE [a government privatization scheme]. Bowman Expeditions clearly state that they are collecting information so that the U.S. government can make better foreign policy decisions. So obviously they are going to take into consideration the information gathered here in these communities and apply it in general to all the communities in similar circumstances in Oaxaca and all over Mexico."

México Indígena's own website reveals, "Since the tumultuous period of political unrest in the summer and fall of 2006, Oaxaca has been in the news as a region where long-standing grievances among many indigenous communities are meshing with other movements in complex ways. Our work will illuminate neglected but important facets of these movements." This reinforces concerns, like Don Juan's and González's, that the project's real focus is on counter-insurgency and social engineering.

When asked about the stated goal of understanding social movements, Herlihy didn't initially recall that from the project's website. When asked in a follow-up interview to clarify the statement on the website, he defended his research and its purpose. "Land is often at the root of social conflict. Our participatory research mapping methodology helped illuminate the neglected and little-understood PROCEDE program and how the neoliberal privatization of 'social property' begins to threaten indigenous lifeways through the introduction of individualistic and capitalistic land tenure practices, changing historic guarantees of the inalienability of communal property," wrote Herlihy in an email. "Indeed, indigenous communities and organizations have only begun protesting the results and impact of the Mexican land certification program."

Another intrinsic part of the war of words in this bitter dispute is the Bowman Expeditions' insistence that UNOSJO, and particularly its director, Aldo González, have no right to speak on behalf of the communities. "UNOSJO is a small NGO that works with Zapotec and other indigenous communities in the Sierra Juárez (but) it is not the political or official voice of the Zapotec communities where we did our research," wrote Herlihy in an official statement with other students and professors participating in México Indígena.

González refutes the charge. UNOSJO—with the affiliation of 24 communities—is the largest Zapotec organization in the region. He said: "Mr. Herlihy and Mr. Dobson—and indeed the U.S. military—are used to speaking to individuals. For them it is sufficient to ask one person as the owner of a piece of land for permission. But for the indigenous communities things aren't like that. Today we are struggling for autonomy for our indigenous peoples, and this is a project bigger than any one single community. So what is happening in Tiltepec and Yagila is affecting other Zapotec communities. For this reason, we have the courage, the duty, and the reason to protest against Bowman Expeditions because it is not just the communities of Tiltepec or Yagila, but all the Zapotec communities in that region, and, ultimately, all of the indigenous communities in Mexico, who are being or will be affected by the studies."

"Let the indigenous people of Oaxaca speak for themselves," wrote Dobson in his February 5 response to critics. The problem in this is that the two communities who hosted the mapping project—San Miguel Tiltepec and San Juan Yagila—have not yet come out publicly on the matter.

Herlihy, the México Indígena team leader, wrote in the aforementioned statement "our (sic) community leaders have openly expressed heartfelt appreciation for our hard work. And you recognize the usefulness of the maps we produced together with you, as well as the training received by the community investigators and university students involved."

González offered a different version of events: "We have been talking to the communities involved in the U.S. studies and they maintain that they were not sufficiently informed about the source of finance and they feel angry because of this. For sure the Herlihy team will try and go to them to change their minds and convince them otherwise, and that will generate more debate."

Zoltan Grossman, a faculty member in Geography and Native American Studies at Evergreen State College who also serves as co-chair of the Indigenous Peoples Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), has been following the project and the controversy surrounding it. "In this case of mapping collective land holdings, it seems like some indigenous communities are working with Herlihy's project, while others are suspicious of it," said Grossman, speaking as an individual and not on behalf of the AAG's Indigenous Group. "Personally, I don't think the support of some indigenous people for the project should be used as an answer to criticism by others."

He added that this could exacerbate internal divisions among the Native peoples, while it also creates a colonial divide-and-conquer dynamic that pits indigenous communities against each other. Meanwhile, in Oaxaca, everyone is taking a position. Don Juan from Lachixila is more disappointed with his neighbors in Tiltepec and Yagila: "They don't have enough awareness of what's really going on. They were fooled."

Melquiades Cruz, an indigenous communications worker from Santa Cruz Yagavila (the first community to stop work with the México Indígena project), admitted that people there were initially interested in the project as a way of empowering local students. "At first the community was interested in the México Indígena project primarily so that the youth would learn how to do this kind of graphic information work, to be useful for the community and the region. The community entered into communication with them, and there were three assemblies during which they presented their project," said Cruz. "It was during the third assembly that the community told them that this project doesn't appeal to us because we think that it seems like an awful lot of money and there must be something else behind it. But if you have the money to just leave your people here to train our people to do the work, that's all, then we can do it. So that this knowledge can be communal, and so that it is shared between the community and the academics that come from outside."

Cruz said the México Indígena team broke off relations after that. This led the community to determine it would not make a formal decision in the assembly. "These people from outside always come trying to sell a great idea—in this case to produce a graphic picture of the community—but this time we saw through it, and we said, it's not just a graphic map, maybe they are interested in the community resources," said Cruz. "We saw that there was something else behind it."

Among the Zapotec in Lachixila, the charge of counter-insurgency activities resounds. UNOSJO has also outlined its concerns in terms of both land privatization and bio-piracy. "It's not just about military control, but also about strategic control over the communities, controlling their land and their consumption," said González.

The bio-piracy issue has been taken up by groups working in food sovereignty and environmental advocacy. Silvia Ribeiro, a researcher from the environmental advocacy ETC Group wrote in the Mexican daily La Jornada, "These maps are of great utility for military ends and for counterinsurgency, but also for industrial purposes (exploitation of resources like minerals, plants, animals and biodiversity; mapping access roads already constructed or 'necessary,' sources of water, settlements, social maps of possible resistance or acceptance of projects, etc)."

"We're putting the power of maps into the hands of these communities," insists Herlihy. But could it also be that these University of Kansas geographers' mapping project is serving as an imperial alibi for the FMSO's Demarest, "champion" of the Bowman project, to further his agenda of strengthening the collaboration among "policymakers, officers and soldiers to have better on-the-ground information" through GIS mapping systems to conduct war?

Santa Cruz Yagavila's Cruz alleged that the geographers were not forthright with where their funding was coming from, thus suggesting either a lack of comfort with the project's relationship with the military, or a conscientious effort to conceal the military designs behind the project. "Herlihy made a presentation in the community showing what were the uses of the maps, where they had worked before, but he never told us where the funds for the project were coming from," said Cruz. "He said it was funded by the University of Kansas or by the University of San Luis, but he never mentioned the source of the funds coming from the Armed Forces of the United States, never."

"By not really revealing their intentions, by not revealing the sources of their funding, by not giving all the information, México Indígena are violating the communities. They are concealing the truth, they are lying," said González. "What they say is a façade, a deception. Yes, we recognize that the maps do have a certain usefulness for the communities, but what we see behind the project is not a helping hand. No, in reality, it's espionage, a form of spying on the communities."

Answering critics' attacks on the lack of transparency, Herlihy recalled how he gave numerous presentations about the project to local communities and "was sure to declare that the project was partially funded by the Foreign Military Studies Office." Nevertheless his description of the FMSO as a "small military research office within Fort Leavenworth down the road from the University of Kansas" seemed deficient, especially in light of the fact that the research being carried out by the office largely concerns counter-insurgency and focuses on "emerging and asymmetric threats."

An Indecent Proposal?

Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan often spoke of America as "a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere," even as he was cozying up to Guatemala's genocidal former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, funding and training death squads in El Salvador, and being charged by the World Court for "unlawful use of force" (terrorism) for Washington's overt and covert support of the Contras in Nicaragua.

In a similar light, neither Dobson nor Herlihy seem to accept any type of radical critique of U.S. power, refusing to acknowledge the country's imperial designs for the region dating back to Manifest Destiny. "My whole rationale for Bowman Expeditions is based on my firm belief that geographic ignorance is the principal cause of the blunders that have characterized American foreign policy since the end of World War II," Dobson wrote in his February 5 statement answering his critics. He told me in an interview that, "America abandoned geography after World War 2 and hasn't won a war since." But statements like that seem to contradict assertions that the project in Oaxaca was conceived exclusively to "help" the local indigenous population.

"It's the prostitution of geography for the national ruling class," said Neil Smith, distinguished professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Smith, whose book American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization exposes Isaiah Bowman, whom KU's Dobson named his project after, as an imperialist and racist. "This project is aptly named the Bowman Expeditions," Smith said. "[It] follows in the tradition that he started."

Dobson and Herlihy's July 2008 article in the Geographical Review reveals that General David Petraeus, co-author of the "U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual," met with México Indígena's research team in October 2006, and commented how, "U.S. troops were unprepared for the 'cultural terrains' of Iraq and Afghanistan and how they needed ways 'to get troops smarter faster.'" Dobson shares with readers his reply, explaining "how geography combines the 'cultural' and 'geographical' terrains into the synthetic 'cultural landscape.'"

In the project's executive summary, prepared by defense contractor Radiance Technologies (whose role according to the company is to provide "requirements oversight"), México Indígena "represents the initial step in a much larger concept of reviving a tradition of research by university scholars providing 'open-source intelligence' on different parts of the world...[in light of] the unfortunate realization that the United States is now perceived as a mighty global power crippled by its own ignorance and arrogance about its dealings with its vast global domain."

The document also states, "Indigenous regions in Mexico, like in so many parts of Latin America and around the world, are where rebellions are fomented, where drugs are produced, where resource pirates operate, and where conditions of poverty and despair drive up the highest rates of our migration. Few would disagree that as we move into the 21st century, indigenous populations are among the most important social actors in struggles of the future of Latin American democracies. Today's populist struggle against neoliberalism has been central to the indigenous movement in Mexico as illustrated by the emergence of the Zapatista army in Chiapas, challenging the corruption and neoliberal strategies of past PRI-run governments at the onset of NAFTA."

Amnesty International (AI), on February 9, issued a statement criticizing a Mexican government human rights report recently submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council. Mexico is one of 16 countries up for review this year by the world body's Universal Periodic Review Working Group. According to AI, the report "fails to acknowledge the worsening human rights climate in many parts of the country." AI also offered an alternative report, which concluded that "Mexican federal, state and municipal police officers implicated in serious human rights violations, such as arbitrary detention, torture, rape and unlawful killings, particularly those committed during civil disturbances in San Salvador Atenco and Oaxaca City in 2006, have not been brought to justice." It also noted that, "Human rights defenders, particular those in rural areas, often face persecution and sometimes prolonged detention on the basis of fabricated or politically-motivated criminal charges."

The FMSO, the principal sponsor of the Oaxaca mapping project, runs the Human Terrain System (HTS), an army program used by General Petraeus in Iraq and in Afghanistan, which embeds anthropologists with military units to conduct field research with the aim of assisting counterinsurgency efforts in the two countries. UNOSJO's first communiqué sent out in January claimed they believe that the Bowman Expeditions are a new manifestation of the counter-insurgency program.

Roberto González, an associate professor of anthropology at San Jose State University and author of American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain, told CounterPunch in an interview that the program is "a scheme to whitewash counterinsurgency and to clean up the image of anti-revolutionary warfare, which is always a dirty business. Even though the U.S. military has more than a century of experience in counterinsurgency warfare (going back to the 'Indian Wars' of the 1800s and the cruel campaign against Filipino revolutionaries in the early 1900s), General David Petraeus and other battlefield technicians have portrayed the method as a 'gentler' means of fighting, while recruiting political scientists, anthropologists, and other social scientists to create the tools to do this." This led the American Anthropological Association's Executive Board to produce a statement officially condemning the Human Terrain program as a violation of the field's ethical tenets, such as ensuring both voluntary informed consent and ensuring the welfare of affected populations.

Dobson, in his Geographical Review article, claims allegations that México Indígena and the Bowman Expeditions are part of HTS are unfounded. "The AGS Bowman Expeditions offers a means of studying the human terrain, but they are substantially different from the human terrain system or human terrain teams as currently constituted: Our purpose is scholarly, not military," wrote Dobson.

"I feel that this particular controversy would not have the traction that it does if it were not for the direct role of the U.S. military, especially in light of the turmoil in Oaxaca," said Evergreen State College's Grossman. "Oaxaca is not just any old state in Mexico and southern Mexico is not just any old region in the Americas, it's an area that has had significant repression in very recent years against indigenous peoples by federal forces funded by the U.S."

Grossman said that given the political turmoil in the region, coupled with U.S. military pronouncements in recent years equating indigenous and anti-globalization movements with insurgency and terrorism, it's not surprising that some people believe that the maps could be used by the Mexican government for repressive actions in the name of stability. Specifically, FMSO analysts have lumped indigenous movements with insurgents and terrorists and suggests they are troublemakers and a threat to U.S. interests.

Adding to the specter of U.S. and state violence and repression in the region, the U.S Joint Forces Command released a report in November 2008 that stated Mexico risked becoming a failed state and, if that were to be the case, it would demand U.S. intervention. Meanwhile, the U.S. House passed a spending bill on February 25 which allocates $410 million for the Merida Initiative, a militarization project modeled after Plan Colombia, to "carry out counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, and border security measures."

CUNY's Smith said he believes the motivation behind the Defense Department is very clear, especially in light of Dobson's words. "It's clear that the work they are doing could feed into the Human Terrain System," he said. "The question to ask is why wouldn't it go into the HTS?"

Grossman essentially agrees with Smith. He believes that the FMSO is interested in the research, if not "officially" for its Human Terrain System program, then to better understand the social and cultural human landscape of the regions research.

But México Indígena's Helihy passionately defended his project and intentions. "This is not an evil military plot to destroy indigenous lands. It's nothing of the sort," said Herlihy. "I knew it would be conflictive precisely because we had FMSO funding, but I hoped it would be a project that would make a difference in the world."

In addition, he stated, "We told the Tiltepec community Assembly, where UNOSJO Director presented the first public denouncement, that we would take down the maps if they wanted us too, and we would do the same for any other study community." Likewise, Dobson notes that one thing he insisted on with the FMSO was that the academic investigator in charge of any of the projects would have sole responsibility for choosing the topic of his or her expedition, which he believes quells any notion that this is a military-run research program.

The debate over this program, the contradictions surrounding it, and the broader question of whether it is ethical for academia to be working so closely with the U.S. military and intelligence community has been going on for decades. But, in a way, it seems closer to beginning rather than ending. Whether this project is "about science in the service of the state and science in the service of elites," as Smith contends, or about using participatory mapping to empower indigenous communities to protect their land and cultural rights, as Herlihy and the projects' other supporters argue, an answer probably won't be fleshed out any time soon.

Grossman said that dealing with research controversies and the ethical questions raised in cases such as this one could be a way for geography to overcome its colonial and imperial past. Indigenous peoples have been waiting over 500 years for the world to overcome its colonial and imperial past. What's uncertain is whether these indigenous communities in Oaxaca can afford to wait a few more.

Z

Cyril Mychalejko is an editor at www.UpsideDownWorld.org, an online magazine covering politics and activism in Latin America. Ramor Ryan contributed to this article from Oaxaca. He is an Irish journalist based in Chiapas, Mexico who wrote Clandestines: the Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile (AK Press, 2006).

The Demarest Factor: US Military Mapping of indigenous communities in Oaxaca, Mexico (Documentary film 55 minutes)

Published on September 15, 2011

(55 minutes) 2010. This film is part of an ongoing investigation which has exposed US military mapping of communally owned indigenous land in the Southern Sierra in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. The mapping took place under the auspices of the department of geography from Kansas University in Lawrence, Kansas in collaboration with the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Fort Leavenworth, in Leavenworth, Kansas. The FMSO senior analyst Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey B. Demarest declares in several essays and texts that communal ownership of property, leads to crime and insurgency. The film irrefutably exposes an ongoing military strategy to criminalize indigenous land tenure and identity in order to secure political and economic interests in the region.

Too often, Jerry Dobson says, the U.S. military has found itself in trouble because it didn’t know enough about the parts of the world where it fought.

Now Dobson will help with an effort to ensure that doesn’t happen again.

Dobson, a professor of geography at Kansas University, is the lead researcher on one of 14 projects to win grants this year from the Minerva Research Initiative, a U.S. Department of Defense effort to learn more about other parts of the world through social-science research. He and other researchers will receive about $1.8 million over three years to study indigenous communities throughout Central America, with a possibility to apply for renewal and receive a total of $3 million over five years. The grants were announced last week.

“There are too many instances where misunderstanding of other areas has cost us,” Dobson said. From Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, he says, the United States may have fared better in many of its conflicts over the past half-century with more knowledge about the culture and politics of other parts of the world.

Dobson’s project will be a collaboration between KU and the American Geographical Society, of which he is president.

He and his partner on the project, KU geography professor Peter Herlihy, will continue work they’ve already begun in Honduras.

It’s part of the American Geographical Society’s Bowman Expeditions program, which Dobson helped create in 2005. The program sends researchers to spots around the world to learn and spread information about other countries, both in scholarly journals and popular media outlets.

“An informed public is essential to democracy,” Dobson said, “and when it comes to foreign policy, we do not have one.”

For this project, Dobson and Herlihy will aim to learn about communities of indigenous people in the seven Central American countries. Many of those areas are racked with poverty and crime, but not all of them. And they want to find out why.

“We just don’t understand these areas that well,” Herlihy said, “and those are areas where you often have a lot of violence.”

They’re especially interested in the role of land ownership. In some of those spots — and, really, much of the world outside of North America and Europe — there is no formal system of land ownership that allows people to claim areas as their own.

“Very little of the world has the kind of secure land ownership that we do here in the United States,” Dobson said.

Their hypothesis is that in indigenous communities where securely owned land is more common, things are more stable.

And in Honduras, where they’re already doing similar research, they’re helping to make that possible. Dobson and Herlihy work with students from KU and from the indigenous communities they’re studying to map out those areas, with help from the residents who know them well. Those maps can make it easier for them to stake a claim to the land they’ve lived on for centuries.

The researchers hope to learn if asserting those rights can help native populations alleviate poverty, crime, distrust of government and other issues.

“In the end, it goes to these much broader, deeper questions about how societies function,” Dobson said

The Lawrence World-Journal recently reported the Defense Department’s decision to fund the latest Bowman Expedition led by the American Geographical Society and the University of Kansas Geography Department. Like the first – and controversial – Bowman expedition to Mexico, this latest venture will be led by KU Geographers Jerome Dobson and Peter Herlihy and will target indigenous communities.

Like previous Bowman Expeditions, the expedition’s goal is to compile basic, “open-source,” information about countries that can be used to inform U.S. policy makers and the military. This time, however, they won’t be focused on a single country. Instead they’ll be working throughout Central America, a region that Herlihy and Dobson have elsewhere called “The U.S. Borderlands.” What is this Expedition about? And why is the Defense Department funding academic research on indigenous peoples?

As with the expedition to Mexico, Herlihy and Dobson are focused on land ownership. Echoing a growing list of military strategists, Herlihy and Dobson contend that areas where property rights are not clearly established and enforced by states provide ideal conditions for criminal activity and violence that threaten regional security.

Herlihy and Dobson propose to use maps made with indigenous communities of their lands to clarify this problem, ostensibly with an eye towards securing legal recognition of their property rights. In their expedition to Mexico, Herlihy and Dobson turned over their findings to Radiance Technologies, an Alabama-based military contractor specializing in “creative solutions for the modern warfighter.” It’s not clear whether this new expedition will do the same, though the program funding it, the Minerva Research Initiative, evaluates proposals according to their ability to address national security concerns.

The rationale for these Expeditions has been parsed in film, print, and by academics (myself included), revealing them to be little more than intelligence gathering efforts carried out by civilian professors and their graduate students. Zapotec communities visited by the previous expedition to Mexico have further denounced Herlihy’s and Dobson’s efforts as “geopiracy,” (and again here) that replay some of colonialism’s oldest tactics of extracting information from communities for people (the U.S. Army) who live elsewhere. Zapotec communities in Oaxaca have also accused Herlihy of failing to inform them of the U.S. Army’s role in funding the Expedition and process data collected by it.

Military funding for the latest Bowman Expedition raises the question of what the U.S. military wants to know about Central America. Moreover, why is it funding research on indigenous peoples? It’s hard to imagine that the U.S. military has much interest in the nuances that distinguish, say, Tawahka communities from Emberá ones. Nor does the military appear concerned with the chronic insecurity of land rights, which continues to be one of the primary threats faced by indigenous communities. A far more likely answer lies with the military’s growing interest in collecting information about the “cultural” or “human” terrain that they can use as needed for a variety of purposes, from managing risks posed by natural disasters to planning military interventions.

Maps of the sort produced by the Bowman Expeditions are certainly useful for this task compiling information about who lives where and place names, to give two examples. But maps can only describe the territory. What they cannot describe are the intricacies of the “terrain” such as the social networks through which access to land and resources are negotiated or the history of struggles over land.

The U.S. military is more familiar with this terrain than one might think. Beginning with the “Banana Wars” of the early 20th Century, the U.S. military has intervened more times in Central America that just about any other region in the world. Indeed the Marines’ first resource on counter-insurgency, the “Small Wars Manual,” drew extensively from their experiences navigating the indigenous Mayanagna and Miskito communities in pursuit of Augusto Sandino’s anti-imperialist forces in Nicaragua.

In the 1980s, U.S. military advisors once again traversed the indigenous areas of Central America for tactical gain. In eastern Nicaragua and Honduras, they helped train and organize Miskito-led armed groups as part of the proxy battle strategy of the Contra War. In Guatamala they targeted Maya communities as bastions of guerilla support with genocidal consequence. Dense forests and other isolated areas throughout the region further provided cover for airstrips also used for illicit shipments of cocaine and weapons orchestrated by the Reagan Administration in support of the Contras.

Herlihy knows this history well. He’s been mapping the forested areas in eastern Honduras used by the Contras and Miskito armed groups since the late 1980s. Herlihy’s (and Dobson’s) main military contact, Geoffrey Demarest, knows this history too. A graduate of the School of the Americas, he served as a military attaché to Guatemala. He’s since become an expert on counter-insurgency, publishing extensively from his experience in Colombia and its relevance for current wars. More recently, he enrolled in the Geography Ph.D. program at KU under Dobson’s supervision.

Still, what is the national security interest in Central America that a Bowman Expedition there can help address? Indigenous land ownership has already been extensively mapped in much of the region as part of property reforms supported by the likes of the World Bank. Several countries in the region now also have promising laws on the books recognizing indigenous and black land rights.

Yet neither maps nor legal reforms have been enough to stop the region from becoming a major transshipment route for cocaine en route to the United States. The State Department estimates that more than 80 percent of cocaine bound for the U.S. passes through Honduras. Some of this trafficking makes use of infrastructure created by counter-insurgency campaigns in the 1980s.

In 2011, Herlihy once again mapped the Honduran Mosquitia as part of another U.S. Army-funded Bowman Expedition. Shortly thereafter, in 2012, the region was targeted by the DEA who made use of counter-insurgency tactics developed in Iraq to fight traffickers. Among those lessons of Iraq applied in the Mosquitia was the use of forward operating bases immersed in the region’s physical and cultural terrain of the Mosquitia. Two of those bases, El Aguacate and Mocorón, were repurposed bases constructed during the Contra War. The campaign fits a broader pattern of escalating militarization of Central America further illustrated by this map compiled by the interfaith Fellowship of Reconciliation.

The application of counter-insurgency tactics gives mapping indigenous areas a more sinister edge. Historically the U.S. military has relied on the designation of “Indian Country” and “tribal areas” to designate areas at the edge of state control, often turning them into free-fire zones where the conventions of war, legal and otherwise, do not apply. Better knowledge of these areas has scarcely reduced incidents of violent conflict as Dobson suggests. Instead, that knowledge has served as a “force multiplier” – to use General Petraeus’s term – that allows the U.S. military to intervene with greater efficiency. Herlihy and Dobson claim to champion the rights of indigenous peoples, but the money and data trail suggests that is only a secondary concern to U.S. military interests.

So why is U.S. military funding academic geographers to do research in indigenous areas in Central America instead of relying on its own people to do the work? In Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has relied on social scientists embedded with combat units as part of the Human Terrain System program to gather similar information. Funding academic researchers to do similar work poses a number of advantages. For starters, it sidesteps the ethical controversy raised by the Human Terrain System. It also brings the added benefit of relying on “civilian” researchers to access communities who might otherwise be wary of soldiers in military uniform. At the same time, it gives the military precisely the kind of detailed, georeferenced information – the spatial “metadata” – sought by the Human Terrain System for areas that lie far from current combat zones. It’s an approach consistent with what geographer Derek Gregory describes as the “everywhere war” currently waged across society on the whole by covert military teams, surveillance, and drones. By taking the measure of indigenous communities according to security interests, the Bowman Expeditions stand to perpetuate a role that is far too common in Geography’s history. The Bowman Expeditions have generated some productive debate (see also here, here, and here) in this regard, though in a context of shrinking budgets for university research and education the allure of military money remains powerful enough to trump ethical concerns.

Meanwhile, as geographers debate the merits of military funding, indigenous peoples continue facing a long list of violent threats from drug trafficking, illegal logging, loss of lands, and institutional racism. The military-funded Bowman Expeditions merely add to that list. Still, as the Zapotec communities in Oaxaca forcefully remind us, it’s their information and the decision to participate in projects like the Bowman Expeditions – or any other research – ultimately resides with them. Herlihy’s and Dobson’s failure to address those concerns will only diminish their access to this field, undermining the kinds of rights and free exchange of knowledge they profess to support.

Embedded Cultural Intelligence: Militarised Anthropology and Counterinsurgency in Contemporary States of Emergency and Intervention

June 23, 2012<!-- at 4:33 pm--> <!--<em class="author">admin</em>-->

Dr David Hyndman and Dr Scott Flower

The debate over anthropology and the security state continues and within the discipline of anthropology itself proponents of the debate initially focussed on America’s latest efforts to ‘militarise’ and ‘weaponize’ the discipline through the Human Terrain System (HTS) such as Weaponizing Anthropology (by Price) and American Counterinsurgency: Human Science and the Human Terrain (by Gonzalez). Several recent books such as The New Imperialism: Militarism, Humanism and Occupation (edited by Forte), Dangerous Liaisons (edited by McNamara and Rubenstein), Anthropologists in the Securityscape (edited by Albro), Peacekeeping under Fire (by Rubenstein), Humanitarians in Hostile Territory (by Van Arsdale) and Contemporary States of Emergency (edited by Fassin and Pandolfi) have started addressing the increasing convergence and cooperation between civil/humanitarian and military organisations and the role of anthropology/anthropologists across the gamut of contemporary interventions, ranging from counterinsurgency to peacekeeping and disaster response.

Overlooked in the recent quest for ‘cultural intelligence’ has been the efforts of other ‘Anglo-Saxon’ countries to also develop military capabilities to better understand culture and cultural factors of violence and conflict behaviour using anthropology and recruiting anthropologists. Interest in how cultural intelligence can be collected and used has increased in the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ world through formalised arrangements such as the ABCA (America, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) militaries. For the latter group of countries British settler colonialism is a unifying theme underlying the recent ABCA military interest in anthropology. ABCA countries are reaching for the tools used to understand and manage the self-determination claims of indigenous nations where their strategic interests are at stake. Human terrain as global ethnographic surveillance, to borrow from Ferguson in Dangerous Liaisons, is a common interest among ABCA countries today because past settler colonialism cannot be demarcated from struggles in the present; therefore anthropology of colonialism is concerned with contemporary anthropology as well as the colonial circumstances from which it emerged.

Keal, in European Conquest and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, includes the ABCA military countries in the inner circle of rich, liberal states that constitute international society and determine the conditions and status of membership. Resistance to this by states and indigenous peoples who do not share those values is already a source of disruption to international order. For just relations between settler societies and indigenous peoples there must be mutual agreement about conditions of sharing that space, the alternatives are denial of rights or removal of indigenous peoples that are unacceptable moral alternatives in the twenty-first century. This research project contextualises the relationship between indigenous peoples, anthropology and the military around past settler colonialism in the ABCA military countries and presents contemporary indigenous nation political movements and conflicts as scenes of civil-military interventions and counterinsurgency.

Dr David Hyndman and Dr Scott Flower respectfully ask for your participation in a survey. You can help us learn more about what anthropologists have to say about the contested contemporary issue of recruitment of anthropologists into and use of anthropological methods by western military forces to assist in counterinsurgency and civil-military relations for stabilisation and peacekeeping. Our research comparatively examines the development of cultural intelligence capabilities by American, British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand (ABCA) militaries and seeks to understand the views of anthropologists within these countries regarding such developments.

The survey will take approximately 15 minutes and asks questions about:

What degree do anthropologists support or oppose their discipline being used by the military for civil-military operations

What grounds do anthropologists base their support or opposition to use of their discipline

Views on the differences between counterinsurgency and civil-military relations in stabilisation, peace-building and conflict prevention.

To take the survey please click here. Your responses will be anonymous and confidential, to view human research ethics approval click on the provided link.

Military Intelligence and the Human Terrain System

The latest issue of the Army’s Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin is devoted to the Human Terrain System (HTS), which is a U.S. Army program to conduct social and cultural studies in support of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bulletin provides theoretical and practical accounts from HTS personnel in the field.

Thus, HTS analyst John Thorne writes that U.S. counterinsurgency operations can themselves generate a violent reaction “by causing shifts in perceptions of relative power or well-being, or through perceived threats to identity.”

Pentagon's Phase Zero Intelligence Human Terrain Program

28.04.2012 17:33

Foreign Internal Defense, Diversion or Drug War?

by John Stanton

The follow-on to the first US Army Human Terrain System program is loosely referred to as HTS: A Phase Zero Intelligence Program. Unfortunately, leadership seems to be reinforcing the caricatures on display in the movie Doctor Strangelove (more below). The responsibility for that is not solely the HTS director's, Colonel Sharon Hamilton. It goes up the chain of command within the US Army and, perhaps, the Office of Secretary of Defense/Intelligence. Throwing $227 million dollars (US) at a damaged program at time when budgets are being squeezed makes little surface sense.

The similarities between the characters in Doctor Strangelove and the personnel in HTS Phase Zero aside, the matter is of the utmost seriousness. On the plus side the word is that CGI, based in Canada and the replacement contractor for BAE Systems, based in the UK, is screening and scrutinizing recruits more thoroughly using established psychological testing protocols and telephone interviews. And there are diligent, hard-working individuals throughout HTS Phase Zero that understand the importance of their mission and produce fine work in spite of the odds.

But various sources have painted a picture of second rate program management and an atmosphere that is polluted secrecy shunning internal or independent auditors. It is cult like in some sense, unaccountable in major respects. The flimsy nature of much of the program's intellectual output has led to speculation that part of the $227 million is being funneled to classified programs elsewhere in the mammoth American national security apparatus. There was even speculation that the Pentagon's new Defense Clandestine Service would use HTS Phase Zero to insert DCS personnel, ostensibly as social scientists, for the purpose of infiltrating into various foreign populations to gather intelligence. But professional intelligence operatives require years of training and that is not HTS Phase Zero's specialty. On the other hand, sticking an operative in an HTS Phase Zero gig for AFRICOM or some other US combatant command may be a probability. These theories arise because no one outside of HTS Phase Zero can figure out what it is and what it is meant to do?

So is it some sort of placeholder program? Are the Pentagon and US Army leadership just plain incompetent or, perhaps, corrupt? Is the $227 million a gift to Canada, to a Canada-based company, for supporting the US war effort? Was it a gift to the British? Will it be to Australia when CGI is done with it?

At any rate, HTS Phase Zero, at least as far as anyone in the USA can tell, has not changed much from its predecessor. Poor decision making remains. For example, the HTS Phase Zero Pilot Program for NORTHCOM saw Teams visit local towns to experiment/question American citizens. Only later did someone apparently inform the program director that the practice might be highly controversial: the apparent extraction of intelligence from private citizens.

A number of sources have provided insights into HTS Phase Zero. Those are listed immediately below.

"There is nothing new to learn about indigenous cultures with respect to why they participate in the drug trade, and attempts to identify key drug operatives or even to engage them, would bring negative publicity from local governments, put those teams in extreme danger, and invite closer scrutiny from congressional oversight committees, not to mention serious ethical and legal implications.

"There is not a single credible academic organization or institution that approves of the Human Terrain System Phase Zero research methodologies. There is not a single [US] Brigade commander who provides any evidence of the effectiveness or use of the research provided by HTS teams. At any one time, at least half of all deployed HTS personnel are on leave, reducing the overall efficiency of each team by 20-50 percent. Not one HTS research product has been subjected to peer-review. They would do better with more linguists and regional or local Subject Matter Experts and HTS provides neither.

Hamilton got spooked last summer when she was informed that the interview training students were conducting in surrounding towns [in the USA] might be interpreted as collecting intelligence on American citizens. Hamilton pulled the plug on that part of training. The quick fix was to use contractors, volunteers, and HTS faculty to role-play people to give the students practice at conducting interviews. This was a disaster in too many ways to cite, but it was subsequently written into the CGI contract to provide up to nine part-time employees who would role-play Brigade staff officers (wearing ACU uniforms in violation of AR 670-1) and local citizens. Can you say "sampling error?" Of course this added to the cost of the contract, and there is no reliable evidence that the training conducted was effective or useful.

An internal report by HTS itself revealed that seven teams are generating about 90% of all the accepted reports....Hamilton directed that a slew of articles be generated for a Military Intelligence Bulletin [available at the Federation of American Scientists Secrecy News site], so that it would appear, that HTS is actually doing something.

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A social scientist was reclassified as a team leader and received about a week or so of training at Fort Leavenworth and is going to NORTHCOM in Colorado Springs, Colorado. There is no conceivable purpose for this other than an attempt to recover from what appeared to be an abysmal failure of the two-person team that was sent to Vicenza, Italy.

HTS is a cash cow for CGI [contractor based in Quebec, Canada] and it seemed ordained by senior leadership that HTS would distance itself from BAE no matter what the cost. Most of the BAE contractors were hired by CGI thanks to a recent federal law allows the hiring of people who previously worked on the contract at significantly reduced salaries. CGI cuts corners by recruiting lower ranked enlisted men and officers, most of whom have little military experience; bringing back former HTS members who either resigned before completing training; taking away individual rental cars, and moving the students around by van or bus; and cutting all the salaries for all the former BAE contractors.

There are allegations/suspicions that CGI got insider information from the senior leadership at US Army HTS. There seem to be too many coincidences connected with CGI winning the contract. Oberon, a company started by a retired female senior US Army officer, was purchased by CGI. Second, CGI seemed to know the position descriptions, salaries of BAE employees, work requirements and salaries of all HTS employees. Why does this matter? Because downgrading requirements from GS 15 to GS 14 results in a significant cost savings for the Army for which CGI can claim credit. There may some type of incentive tied into this contract. CGI circulates lists of prospective candidates to the HTS leadership (remember, these are prospective private contractors). HTS approves or disapproves and this improves the probability of acceptance and graduation rates for CGI. This may be a prohibited personnel practice."

HTS Phase Zero: Peace is their Profession?

Peace is Our Profession was the marketing phrase for the US Air Force's Strategic Air Command (SAC). It was coined by Brigadier General Edward Martin for use in USAF recruitment campaigns. According to the Official Website of the USAF, "General Martin next was assigned to Headquarters Strategic Air Command at Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., where he assumed duties as chief of the Airmen Retention Branch and then deputy chief, Plans and Programs Division, in the Directorate of Personnel. While in this assignment, he authored the phrase Peace is our Profession which was subsequently adopted as Strategic Air Command motto and [he] managed a retention program which produced the highest reenlistment rates known to the Air Force."

The ironic motto would gain national and international attention thanks to one of Stanley Kubrick's classic movies Doctor Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and Leaned to Love the Bomb. Legendary lines from the movie include: "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room...Mr. President, I am not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh, depending on the breaks...

We were afraid of a doomsday gap... Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!

Mr. President, it is not only possible, it is essential. That is the whole idea of this [doomsday] machine, you know. Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the FEAR to attack. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision-making process which rules out human meddling, the Doomsday machine is terrifying and simple to understand and completely credible and convincing..."

We Must Not Allow a Cultural Knowledge Gap!

A Defense News report titled U.S. Army's Human Terrain Experts May Help Defuse Future Conflicts dated March 2012 features material from the US Army Human Terrain website and an interview with Colonel Sharon Hamilton, USA, director of HTS 2.0.

"If we raise the level of understanding [among U.S. troops], we establish a context baseline of beliefs, values, dreams and aspirations, needs, requirements, security - if we can do all of that in Phase Zero, we might not be talking about being somewhere else for 10 years...The Phase Zero concept calls for sending human terrain teams to regions as part of theater-engagement and security-cooperation plans, and to exercises and humanitarian assistance missions - anything involving the military in an area in which it needs socio-cultural information," said Hamilton.

The sequel to the Defense News March of 2012 story was April 2012's New Tool Eyed for Anti-Drug War.

In this article Colonel Hamilton is reported to have been "working on a plan to expand HTS to other regions such as Africa and Latin America. The teams would participate in phase zero operations, which refer to collaborating with local authorities to try to prevent wars or insurgencies. The U.S. Army could send a team of socio-cultural experts to Mexico to aid in counter-narcotics work...The move would be in keeping with the broader role the U.S. Defense Department has assigned to the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System...HTS members were sent to Northern <!-- pagebreak -->Command's headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado., about two weeks ago to explore whether there are gaps in cultural knowledge that might warrant sending human terrain experts to Mexico said Hamilton. They sit down with the staff and help identify gaps in their plans; their engagements, and their training. What don't you know about the populations? If Northern Command gives the order, the experts could be sent to Mexico sometime after the September conclusion of a six-month pilot effort in Colorado Springs. Before sending experts to Mexico, 'we will conduct thorough secondary research using all available sources to try to fill those gaps,' Hamilton added by email.

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security matters. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com

[This is an update to Iran Should Release Amir Hekmati: A Hapless Product of the US Army’s Human Terrain System]

Amir Hekmati is currently on death row in Iran for allegedly spying for the United States of America. In addition to being a former member of the US Army’s Human Terrain System—and trained as a cultural intelligence collector-- he was most recently a former employee of Six3 Systems located in McLean, Virginia. His title with the company was Intelligence Analyst with a US Army contract expiration date of 9/23/2011 and a government contactor ID that was set to expire in November 2011. At one point earlier, Hekmati owned a company called Lucid Linguistics whose purpose was to improve the US military’s ability to communicate in the Middle East.

All of which makes the focus on his links to KUMA LLC video games rather absurd as a lead story pushed by many media outlets around the world.

Six3 Systems is a portfolio company held by GTCR, a private equity company, which does have a former high level CIA employee in its leadership ranks (see below). The GTCR description of Six3 Systems is as follows: “Six3 Systems is a high-end national security and defense intelligence services provider focused on developing and acquiring specialized capabilities that cater to the security intelligence community, Department of Defense and civilian security agencies. This national security and defense company is primarily focused on opportunities involving biometrics security, advanced data interpretation and analysis, cyber security and security intelligence / counterintelligence operations, training and support.”

The CEO of the company is Robert Coleman. His experience includes “…his tenure at the White House National Security Council Crisis Management Center during the Reagan and Bush I administrations, where he developed systems to assist in the collection and dissemination of critical intelligence data. He has additional experience supporting national security efforts while working for SAIC and Raytheon Technical Services.” The Vice President for Business Development is Ryan Wagener who is a former CACI employee. He “…leads all activities associated with pursuing and winning new business in the Intelligence, Defense, and Civilian markets…Wagener brings 16 years of experience in the intelligence and national security federal contracting community.”

Six3 Systems biometrics guru is Mike Zembrzuski. He is “a former commander of the Army's premier counterintelligence battalion in CONUS, Mike led the Army effort to integrate missions with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces. He is an acknowledged expert in the areas of homeland security and technology protection and has extensive experience at the highest levels of the U.S. Government. His overseas experience is remarkable, with deployments to Afghanistan, Bosnia, Croatia, Guantanamo, and Iraq, along with service throughout Europe.”

Tom Ladd, executive vice president for ISR is the “former CEO of BIT Systems, a leading provider of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Software development solutions to the Intelligence Community and DoD. As one of the three founders of BITS, Mr. Ladd was responsible for the day to day running of BITS including hiring, new business efforts, human resources, accounting, and contracts. Mr. Ladd began his career at CIA as a technical weapon's analyst. He spent three years supporting weapons inspections and finished his career at CIA as the Branch Chief for the Missile Systems Branch, responsible for the assessment of foreign ballistic and cruise missile capabilities.”

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security matters. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com

Iran should release Amir Hekmati

12.01.2012

A Hapless Product of US Army's Human Terrain System

by John Stanton

"The poor guy," said a source.

Nathan Hodge writing for the Wall Street Journal has confirmed that Amir Hekmati worked for BAE System's as a member of the US Army's Human Terrain System. "An industry official familiar with his civilian contracting work said he was involved in training for the Human Terrain System, a U.S. Army program to provide cultural advice to military units, before went to work for the Army," Hodge writes. "Troy Rolan, an Army spokesman, confirmed Mr. Hekmati's employment there, and said he left the Army in June 2011.

This is disturbing news indeed.

Human Terrain System program manager Colonel Sharon Hamilton announced in public at a Special Operations conference before the 2011 holidays that the Human Terrain System (HTS), Version 2.0, is now officially an intelligence collection activity. According to some, this leads back to the murky intelligence activities of a former HTS employee named Stephen James "Banger" Lang.

In a recent video, Hamilton discusses HTS 2.0 pointing out that the Office of the Secretary of Defense/Intelligence gave marching orders to HTS leadership to figure out how HTS can evolve to support Special Operations Village Stability Operations, and work other Human Terrain projects within the Pentagon's Geographic Combatant Commands. The "power of HTS", she points out in the video, is the ability to determine the how's and why's of indigenous populations and feed that information to commanders before negotiation, invasion and occupation. The wording Hamilton uses is interesting as such information, going forward, would have to be gathered covertly, one assumes.

If HTS is going to support USSOCOM, which is not confined to one continent, then the classification level of program participants would have to rise beyond the "secret" level. And in fact, that is happening as CGI/Oberon Associates, now in possession of $227 million (US) to run the program, brings in a bundle of new contractors in the form of sub-primes or individual contractors.

The history of HTS is, quite simply, grotesque and an embarrassment to the US military and the men and women who tried, but failed, to get the program to work. It has been a disaster for Civil Affairs as millions have been burned to make HTS work that should have gone to Civil Affairs units at Fort Bragg and elsewhere. For years critics of the program-the most vociferous from within HTS-argued that HTS always was an intelligence program run out of US Army TRADOC, G2. There are some 70 articles written over a three year period that report on the program's failings, deaths, inadequate recruiting and training, allegations of fraud, waste and abuse, murder, hostages, sexual harassment, and more. Those pieces also offer recommendations for improvement. Numerous investigations run by the DOD-IG, the US Army CID, and the US Congress Office of Special Counsel have been conducted on HTS 1.0.

If the Iranians knew how screwed up HTS 1.0 was and the inadequate training Hekmati received they would set him free. He is the product of damaged US Army and Pentagon leadership. Give the poor guy a break.

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security matters. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com

The reports cover areas that include news that a social scientist in Human Terrain Analysis assisted in interrogations, as may have one belonging to the Human Terrain System, even while the program officially insisted it was not involved with "intelligence" gathering; related to the last point, we also learn about Eric Rotzoll, former CIA, also involved with HTS; we learn about the further development of human terrain mapping technologies; in addition we read about the use of HTS data that is uploaded to databases which are then used to create extensive, detailed simulations of actual Afghan villages; we have more notes on military funding for university research aligned with national security goals, and counterinsurgency; we catch glimpses of retired military professionals joining the private sector, and boasting in part about their "human terrain" expertise; we see more discussion on anthropology as a "useful" and "practical" discipline to the powerful; and, lastly, a few funny and even bizarre videos about the Human Terrain System.

The following is a list of articles and key extracts that deal specifically with the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System, and more broadly with "human terrain" applications of social sciences to military missions. The larger phenomenon of interest to AJP has to do with the militarization of academia. Emphases in bold have been added.

The reports cover areas that include news that a social scientist in Human Terrain Analysis assisted in interrogations, as may have one belonging to the Human Terrain System, even while the program officially insisted it was not involved with "intelligence" gathering; related to the last point, we also learn about Eric Rotzoll, former CIA, also involved with HTS; we learn about the further development of human terrain mapping technologies; in addition we read about the use of HTS data that is uploaded to databases which are then used to create extensive, detailed simulations of actual Afghan villages; we have more notes on military funding for university research aligned with national security goals, and counterinsurgency; we catch glimpses of retired military professionals joining the private sector, and boasting in part about their "human terrain" expertise; we see more discussion on anthropology as a "useful" and "practical" discipline to the powerful; and, lastly, a few funny and even bizarre videos about the Human Terrain System.

Dr. Martin Scott Catino, a counterinsurgency adviser and specialist in U.S. foreign and security policy, will speak at Virginia Military Institute Wednesday, Dec. 7. The talk, “Counterinsurgency and Culture: A Report from Afghanistan,”....Currently a counterinsurgency adviser for DevelopMental Labs Inc., Catino has served in the United States, Iraq, and Afghanistan in intelligence, supervisory, and advising posts for the U.S. government. In 2009-2010, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, he served as the deputy team leader and lead social scientist of the Human Terrain Analysis Team at Multi-National Division-South, Basra, Iraq. This past year, in Operation Enduring Freedom, he worked as the acting senior intelligence officer for a Defense Intelligence Agency unit at Camp Julien, Kabul, Afghanistan. This past spring he was embedded with a platoon of the 34th Infantry Division conducting operations in Kabul province.

...a new program that selects and trains female soldiers to embed with special operations teams across Afghanistan to cultivate relationships with local women and children, who make up about 70 percent of the population....The program is designed to assist counterinsurgency operations by tapping into a reservoir of female voices that have largely gone unheard because of local customs that frown upon American men and Afghan women interacting....Baldwin assessed schools and health clinics, facilitated meetings between village elders and nongovernmental organizations and participated in three women’s shuras From those meetings, she discovered many women wanted to learn how to read and write or sew. She was able to map “the human terrain,” like piecing together family trees, from her interactions with the Afghan women.

...Eric Rotzoll, a military man with intelligence community connections. As a deputy commander of a "provincial reconstruction team" (PRT) in Zabul Province, Afghanistan in 2004 and 2005, he planned and led civil affairs operations in support of counterinsurgency in the region. From 2006 to 2010, he worked as an "all source analyst" for Defense Department intelligence subcontractor Northrop Grumman. Still with the military at that time, he also served from July 2008 to July 2009 as a Human Terrain Team (HTT) leader in Afghanistan. The HTTs, ostensibly comprising privately contracted civilian anthropologists and other social scientists, have been assigned to each Army brigade in Iraq and Afghanistan since late 2005. Armed on patrol, such "academic embeds" have worked to provide cultural and social "human intelligence," or "Humint," on various "locals" as part of the counterinsurgency effort in both countries. In January, 2009, an embedded journalist moving with an HTT unit on the ground in Afghanistan identified Rotzoll as "the man in charge" and "a former analyst for the CIA...." No mere enlisted man, but an academically trained intelligence warrior, Rotzoll apparently brought a particular added expertise to the "Grand Strategy Workshop." His name also subsequently appeared on the UW JASONs roster for 2009-2010, his affiliation listed simply as "US Army."

As in Iraq, the United States military has responded to bad news with counterinsurgency: eliminate troublemakers in the dark of night, with the most lethal arts, and befriend tribal elders by day, with cultural sensitivity and expertise. The Army has gone so far as to embed credentialed social scientists with front-line troops in “Human Terrain Teams” that engage in “rapid ethnographic assessment” — conducting interviews and administering surveys, learning about land disputes, social networks and how to “operationalize” the Pashtun tribal code. The military, in short, demands local knowledge. But what kind of local knowledge is in supply, and what does it indicate? Though the chief purveyors of such insight, academic ethnographers, have balked at working with the military — the American Anthropological Association issued a report condemning the Human Terrain program as a violation of professional ethics — they have not ignored the country.

Morgan State University has been selected to receive a five-year, $1.8 million federal grant to begin a degree program in national security. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Intelligence Community Centers of Academic Excellence Program chose Morgan and the University of South Florida to be awarded with grants to establish programs in National Security Studies. The National Security Studies program will be aimed at honing skills needed in the intelligence community such as international relations, foreign language and cultural immersion, scientific and technical programs of study, including cyber security....Under its five-year grant deal, Morgan will establish a consortium of historically black schools in Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina to do research in human terrain systems and bio-systems with specific applications to South Asian countries such as Afghanistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Pakistan. The National Security Studies Program was established during 2005 in response to the nation's increasing need for professionals in the intelligence community who are educated and trained with the unique knowledge, skills and capabilities to carry out America's national security objectives.

For decades, the Army's Aviation and Missile Command, Space and Missile Defense Command, NASA, and other institutions have turned to UAH [University of Alabama, Hunstville] in the search for solutions to complex technical issues. But Horack [Dr. John Horack, UAH Vice President for Research] thinks there is an element they're missing. The Department of Defense, he says, is "transforming in ways that aren't fully predictable," facing new threats in a highly-charged political environment and constrained budget situation. And while the military has always looked to America's universities for help in solving complex technical issues, Horack thinks they should also look for help with what he terms "the human terrain." University faculty, he says, can take a fresh look at problems and issues, and bring insights and perspectives to problems facing America's military planners. "There is a need for improved socio-economic awareness. But there is no place to go on the GSA schedule to get this type of information." The military, he says, have underutilized America's universities, failing to get from them vital information that could aid strategy and operations in missions around the globe. "We're not using university muscle as well as we could," he says.

....when the anthropology “tribe” assembles this year, it will have a new topic to discuss: its links with “power” – or, at least, the US military. Last month, the AAA posted an article from Nature on its website that claimed that the US military has been employing the services of anthropologists in Afghanistan to improve its data-gathering techniques. In particular, during the past five years, it has apparently run so-called “human terrain analysis” programmes, to make its Afghan operations more culturally sensitive....But what has made this latest revelation so controversial is that Julia Bowers, the anthropologist named by Nature, was not just writing tomes about Afghan marriage rituals, she was aiding interrogations too. Or as Nature reported her telling a conference: “Typically human-terrain analysis is more of a human data-gathering and mapping approach…” but cultural expertise was “key in the support I was providing to the interrogator to develop a relationship with the detainee”. While, crucially, it is unclear how widespread this practice might be, the revelation has reawakened the debate about just how far social scientists should allow themselves to aid the elite....“Advising people on how to extract information from people who don’t want information extracted, that is the antithesis of what the anthropological encounter is supposed to look like,” Hugh Gusterson, a network leader, has observed. But the pressures will not die away soon; not when budgets are being cut, jobs are scarce and governments (and corporations) are desperate to get better information about culture. To put it another way, precisely because anthropologists are good at analysing cultures and power structures, their research is of interest to people in… er… power. It is a bitter irony; even – or especially – in Afghanistan.

NEAH Power Systems, Inc. announced today it has appointed Col. Lamont Woody, US Army (Retired), most recently a principal of the Laconia Group, as its defense advisor to its Board of Directors. In this role, Col. Woody will advise the company in international defense and government relations and various potential collaboration, partnership and business development opportunities....Col. Woody [in his military career] also implemented human terrain, social networking systems, and law enforcement systems and programs.

Even the panel on the Human Terrain System (HTS) – a topic of great interest and personal involvement for me – was too tactical in its focus....My own take as an outsider (i.e., a person who does not tow any party line) is that our Achilles heel related to intelligence is the ever-growing complexity of our Intel bureaucracy and the mountainous nature of Intel data. We collect a lot, but have no clue as to what to do with it. I heard the evidence of that during the panel on HTS.

The panel (video link) speculated on socio-cultural intelligence as a new facet of intelligence, ie SOCINT. Sharon Hamilton provided a lot of information about the HTS (now over 40 in total, with 31 teams in Afghanistan). It has now been given permanent funding (rather than through Supplementals). She said they use the NGA 12 human geography standards of data to make a baseline dataset (video 1:49’50″), and that 55% of their products are unclassified at the moment. Hamilton claimed that HTS does not have to “convince” the social science community (of the value of HTS) because they (the Army) fill their HTS classes (video at 1:34’00″). You can take that statement with a pinch of salt, no doubt.

Cultural expertise was “key in the support I was providing to the interrogator to develop a relationship with the detainee”, said Julia Bowers, principal senior analyst for human terrain at SCIA, a company based in Tampa, Florida, that provides socio-cultural services for the military and intelligence community....Bowers worked with the U.S. Central Command’s human terrain analysis branch, which is separate from the Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS), a better known program that embeds social scientists in combat units. Both, however, are designed to provide the military with better cultural understanding and expertise....The interesting question is whether anyone associated with the HTS, which has been dogged with controversy over its five year existence, has been involved with interrogations. An internal memo — dated March 16, 2009 and signed by then-HTS program manager retired Col. Steve Fondacaro — notes that “HTS does not have DoD [Department of Defense] approval to conduct interrogation operations.” “HTS personnel are not trained and certified in interrogation methodology and as a result will not conduct interrogations,” the memo continues. Nevertheless, one former employee me that this is precisely what appears to have happened in 2009; but when the employee complained to the program’s senior leadership, they did nothing. When asked about this, Fondacaro replied in an email that “all the units we supported ran interrogations, just like they ran mess halls, vehicle maintenance, medical support ops, civil affairs etc. and HTS supported the unit.”....“Our team members may have been asked to help or advise in any or all of these areas where it related to greater insight and understanding of the population,” he told Nature. “But it did not result in any of these operation becoming core mission capabilities HTS focused upon.”

So far, the HTS has been involved in interrogations in just one experiment. A former employee of the HTS, who asked not to be identified, says that they learned in 2009 that HTS personnel were involved at one point in interrogations in Afghanistan. "I sent it up the chain at Fort Leavenworth; they knew about it," the employee says. "It struck me as blatantly unethical. I didn't want anything to with it." The employee, who describes the work as "the exact opposite of what the program says it is", left the HTS shortly after voicing their concerns. Retired Army Col. Steve Fondacaro, who headed HTS until he was ousted in a management shakeup last year notes that all the units that HTS teams support are involved in interrogations.

The real irony of Governor Scott's remarks [about anthropology being an impractical degree area that is not useful for finding employment] is that anthropology can be so practical that it even makes many anthropologists uneasy, as in the Defense Department's Human Terrain Program, condemned as unethical by a commission of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2009.

To enable the military to fuse together the data at its disposal and make better decisions, faster, the HumanGeo Group developed ISEBOX (Integrated Socio-Cultural Environment for Behavior Observation Exploitation), a geospatial threat-forecasting application that allows data with different spatial resolutions to be intermixed while preserving the original data. ISEBOX identifies friendly forces, trends, geo-political activity, and threat indicators to provide operations planners with critical access to data required to perform Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB). ISEBOX uses variable precision data encodings of location to facilitate non-obvious pattern detection and predictive analysis in the geospatial domain....ISEBOX ingests the widest range of open sources of geospatial data (such as social media, civilian government sources, NGO data, and community-driven data collections) and provides a means of combining the sources to enable analysts to detect non-obvious patterns in the data in order to “tip and cue” planners, collectors, and analysts to points on the ground defined by geography, time, function, and analytic discipline.

The villagers are bits of software code, and the Americans who “visit’’ are players in a videogame-like program designed not only for training purposes but for intelligence analysis. The program, which loosely resembles the game SimCity, is part of a US government effort to develop sophisticated computer models of real Afghan villages — complete with virtual people based on actual inhabitants — in an attempt to predict their reaction to US raids and humanitarian aid. The project, spearheaded by a University of Pennsylvania engineer at the behest of an undisclosed US government agency, straddles the line between research and intelligence as part of a wider US effort to design software capable of forecasting human behavior in war zones. This type of research, often referred to as “human terrain mapping,’’ has attracted increased funding in recent years from US military planners who believe it will become a crucial tool for combating terrorism and insurgencies...

“Are we going to detain someone if a computer predicts that he will become an insurgent?’’ asked Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist at George Mason University. “The real danger of models is their seductiveness. They can be so realistic and powerful that it is easy to forget they are just a model, and they start to rely on them more and more.’’ The concerns were so great that the US Department of Energy, which controls the national laboratories that own some of the most sophisticated computers in the country, has pushed back against recent efforts to enlist its scientists in the work. Citing uncertainty about how the military will use this research, Energy Secretary Steven Chu issued a memo late last year barring employees from working with data about individuals, citing fears that it could violate a federal law mandating that human research subjects never be harmed. “The lack of full disclosure of the purpose and the potential repercussions to subjects recruited for participation . . . undermines any . . . ability to review such work against federal requirements for the protection of human research volunteers,’’ Chu wrote in December. The project also adds fuel to an ongoing debate over whether social scientists should ply their trade for the military, since some virtual villages are created using surveys taken by embedded social scientists known as human terrain teams....Silverman believes that one day, the whole of southern Afghanistan will be recreated in a vast computer model....Shortly after the human terrain teams were launched in 2005, the Marines paid Silverman to study what could be done with data they had collected.

He published a paper arguing that it should be fed into simulators to help forecast events. Since then, the human terrain teams have shifted their data collection methods from open-ended reports toward more rigid questionnaires that can easily be uploaded into a database, according to former terrain team members. John Allison, an anthropologist who began training as a team member last November but has since resigned, said the teams were taught to upload the data into a classified Pentagon database known as SIPRNet, where is it distributed to a host of US agencies, some of whom pass it on to analysts like Silverman. Steve Fondacaro, the project manager for the Army’s human terrain system that oversees the data-collection teams, said the information is primarily used by commanders on the ground to design effective development projects. He said the data are not used to harm anyone. But he also acknowledged that he does not know what other agencies do with the information. “I don’t spend a lot of time tracking down what the government people are doing with the data that we access on the ground,’’ he said, adding that he did not know about Silverman’s project.

VIDEOS

The University of Hawaii at Manoa and its Department of Anthropology plays host to the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System, and in particlar its own graduate, Dr. Christopher A. King, social science director for HTS (as King's presentation slides show [see slide 6], that Department produced five of HTS' anthropologists). Apparently, Dr. King is happier with this version of his presentation, as it has not been censored or deleted, as happened recently. Dr. King makes less than credible assertions in taking questions from the audience, toward the end, that HTS staff have total control over their information--please review the article extracts above for contrary evidence. He has also fails to address how a current HTS trainer, former intelligence analyst and former team member in Afghanistan, pilfered confidential fieldnotes and passed them on to military intelligence, as evidenced in the WikiLeaks releases.

And finally, on an utterly bizarre note, what appears to be an insider's video of a HTS graduation ceremony:

AAA 2011: A Review of Some Presentations on Military, Security, and Intelligence Topics

Report and commentary by AJP member Maximilian C. Forte:

For those who could not make it to the recently concluded conference of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal, or who were there but found themselves compelled to attend/participate in any of a number of other important sessions, here is a summary and review of some of the highlights of presentations made around topics dealing with the military, national security, and intelligence. Originally, I was invited by five different session organizers to present papers on their panels, and after some vacillation, I agreed to present on two, dealing with WikiLeaks and secrecy, and the other dealing with research about the covert and military operations. I attended a few other sessions that had similar themes, and this is the substance of this report. Hopefully, and in the spirit of "accessibility," more people in the future will produce blog reports of the contents of sessions for those who might otherwise miss out completely.

Sharing some of the ideas, details, and interactions that came out of the recently concluded conference meets with a couple of limitations: a) I cannot reproduce entire papers received, because in most cases these are intended for publication; b) in other cases I did not take detailed notes, and so some presentations are not even mentioned here; and, c) there is always the risk that I may not be accurately representing what was said, especially in those instances where I am relying on memory (I have tried to minimize those).

Deployment Stressed

The first session I attended at the AAA conference was "Deployment Stressed: Legacies of the War on Terror in Home Front Communities," organized by Jean N. Scandlyn of the University of Colorado at Denver. (Here I should point out that the University of Colorado had a prominent presence in this conference in particular where military and intelligence topics were the focus.) Recently I came across "Deployment Stressed" which is also the title of this related project blog at the University of Colorado. Christopher King, anthropologist and social science director of the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System also attended this event as a member of the audience, as well as the other events discussed below.

Andrew Bickford (George Mason University) presented an extremely insightful and incisive paper titled "Super Soldiers and Super Citizens: Armored Life in the United States." Bickford described how in the U.S. (and this could be applied to Canada, and elsewhere), soldiers have been constructed by the state as almost mythical creatures, with the role of myth helping to render soldiers unquestionable. These are the agents of violence, where violence created and sustains the state, which is always prepared to use violence--in that order, the soldier is cast as "the best possible citizen" that the state can produce. Again, it is worth noting how in Canada we also hear government ministers declaring soldiers to be our most special citizens, our most valued citizens, as if their work was the most productive and useful, and as if their "sacrifices" (they volunteer, and get paid) were more important than the sacrifices of others made on a daily basis in the non-violent sectors of society.

From there, Bickford began to focus a great deal on medicine and health technology, as a means he argued of mitigating the effects of war, not to end war, which of course would be the clearest solution to preventing the harmful effects of war. The role of advanced medicine, applied to soldiers' bodies, is to create an illusion that they are "superhuman" and thus eminently deployable. Medicine makes war palatable, and makes war seem clean. An array of drugs and psychotherapies are administered in order to shield, enhance, and prolong the life of the soldier, and to demonstrate the inherent superiority of the American soldier. Bickford reconnects these medical procedures and rationales to what he calls "the military imaginary"--which involves the processes and tropes by which states make soldiers. The internal regulation of the soldier becomes the external regulation of the state--the soldier is the state in action. Militarized medicine becomes part of the production of an "armored life" (we can see the influences of both Hegel and Agamben in Bickford's theorizing). The internal armouring of the body of the soldier is the armouring of the state. Bickford ended with some much needed, provocative questions: if the specialists and authorities can banish the fear of warfare, what else can they banish? He asks how the impact of killing, who matters most, why some are killed, etc., are the kinds of questions that are held away by the processes of making medically enhanced super soldiers.

David Bayendor (University of Colorado Denver) presented his work under the title of "Human Terrain Redux--A 'Halfie' Talks Anthropology and the Army," which was also quite unusual for being a presentation by someone both in the military, and anthropology, who is critical of militarist ideology but not without some reservations. While acknowledging the fetishizing of warfare, and the heroizing of the masculinity, "courage" and "sacrifice" of soldiers that forms part of "the military normal" (an idea he credited to Catherine Lutz, involving the militarization of social institutions, values, etc., shaped by and prepared for war), he added that he did not view the military as a total institution. He thus devoted some time to describing the military as an intermediate institution, between the military and the civilian, yet still forming a world that is largely off limits to civilians. As Bayendor noted, quoting from Laura Nader, powerful groups are notorious for resisting being studied. (Throughout the presentation, Bayendor quoted repeatedly from the works of anthropologists critical of militarism/militarization, adding his own perspectives as someone who is also part of the military.) Speaking of powerful institutions, Bayendor who is apparently no fan of HTS, noted how HTS members appear to be very excited about being in a powerful institution, suggesting that whatever their original intent for joining HTS, their perspectives became altered by being in close proximity to high-ranking officers, on bases, and so forth.

Speaking of ethnic and generally marginalized minorities who make up a large part of the U.S. fighting force, including foreign citizens from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, Bayendor made the point that often it is the victims of the power system that are drawn into service to support the system, participating in their own oppression in effect. Bayendor also commented on how "support our troops", "thank you for our service" and what I would call the yellow ribbon industry, work to keep critical questions at bay. He ended his presentation in speaking of the military's appropriation of anthropological knowledge by means other than HTS, and showed a slide featuring a list of key texts in anthropology from the U.S. Army's own online database--a list he had accessed as late as three days prior to the conference and which featured a number of prominent titles, including Malinowski's Practical Anthropology and Gluckman's Rituals of Rebellion.

Sarah J. Hautzinger (Colorado College) further explored some of the themes raised above, in her presentation titled "Battle-Speak on a Domestic Homefront." (I noted how choosing to term the local and the domestic as the "home front" is itself an example of "battle-speak," which the title of the session seemed to reinforce, though the irony may have been intentional.) Hautzinger discussed the domestication of war metaphors in the U.S., with the adoption of terms such as "battle buddies" and "deployment" among those not militarily deployed abroad, or in any actual armed conflict. Among the facets she raised were "battle" as metaphor, as metonymy, and as synecdoche. The effect is to reinforce war as a paradigm for symbolically ordering understandings of the world, even as those adhering to this paradigm are involved in trying to aid those suffering from war. Hautzinger also raised the point that in talking about the losses suffered from war, the focus is almost always on U.S. losses alone. This was an interesting paper for addressing issues of cultural militarization and hegemonization (her word), in how individuals can become complicit in their own subordination, as they buy into paradigms that sanitize and euphemize war, even when they directly face its bloody consequences. Her work, as I suggested, took some of the panel's themes on language a bit further, speaking in terms of civilian-military code-switching and the use of insider argot to build solidarity across civilian-military lines.

Jean N. Scandlyn (University of Colorado Denver) in her presentation, "Promises, Promises: The Military and Opportunity Structures for American Youth," was clearly pressed for time--and in a long session, my own attention began to wane. As a result, I came away with just three particularly interesting arguments made in this presentation, but which I present in a disjointed fashion given the state of my notes: 1) that those motivated to join the military in pursuit of economic and/or educational benefits (these are often the same), are also those suffering from higher rates of PTSD; 2) most recruits come from southern states--the south-east and south-west--from economically disenfranchised conditions, where there is also a long tradition of military service...and she suggested that the relationship between the two is not merely incidental; and, 3) practices that depersonalize "the enemy," beginning with the use of silhouette targets used in weapons training.

Christopher King, Human Terrain System:

Originally, seven papers were scheduled for this session, with no time at all for discussion--as was strangely common at this AAA conference, remarkably not what one would expect in a conference if there is no room for actually conferring. With one cancellation, we had about 10 minutes of discussion that was dominated largely by a very talkative Christopher King from HTS. He was not presenting any papers at the conference, but was present at almost all of the events of direct relevance to military, security, and intelligence themes, and I had the chance to converse with him on several occasions, especially as we tended to sit together or very close. I am not sure if King was aware that he raised some eyebrows when--speaking as someone representing a program that for a long time stressed that it was not about "gathering intelligence"--said that he could put a number of the panellists in touch with people he knows in the "Department of Intelligence". He seemed to be eager to get the panellists to communicate with the military, which of course they already were since their research was grounded in that communication. When he began to say that one of the "nice things" about the military is that it can "really be self-reflective"--thereby missing the point of evidence to the contrary--he seemed to wear some patience thin and the moderator interjected to move on to someone else. On the other hand, King is neither an abrasive nor aggressive person, so the panel could have suffered much worse.

It was at this event that I overheard one young woman approach King, who stood in front of me, to ask him about working for the military--and he gave her his card. Interesting move, that of choosing a session critical of militarization in the hope of finding someone from the military in the audience so as to market oneself. One of the panel participants later asked me what King was doing at the conference, and if the AAA had not censured HTS.

Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic

I had the great pleasure of finally seeing James Der Derian's now well-circulated film, Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic. And who better to sit next to for the whole film and discussion, if not HTS' Christopher King? At this event, King did not take part in the discussion--it would not have been a welcoming crowd. I stayed silent, as it was important for me to observe American anthropologists, whom I have never heard from before, weigh in on these topics, only to discover that if they were in any way a representative sample then HTS meets with fairly wide condemnation among AAA members.

The room was packed with people, many standing, and the discussion afterwards was quite animated, in-depth, and intelligent. During the film, members of the audience got quite loud on occasion, either laughing at some of the speakers (the Marine officer who proudly boasts, "we are not killers...we are professional killers," or the suggestion that Arabs, because of their inherent cultural difference, yes, really would fear being stripped naked, jeered at by women, and having angry dogs barking at their crotches--"unlike American men," as one audience member joked), or even hissing at Montgomery McFate, quite sinister and dark by way of contrast to the man sitting next to me. Overall, King, who said that he too had never seen the film before, seemed to think it was fair and liked it. I also thought it was a remarkable film from which I even learned a few "new" details (that is, new to me).

Der Derian definitely deserves all of the praise he has received for this film, for the complex questioning, editing, and narrative structure. There was some debate about "balance" in the film--yes, we hear from almost all sides (the Afghan side is, of course, once again mute...a little more than a small omission from almost all debates about anthropologists joining the military, or even in debates about the occupation of Afghanistan). Some felt that, nonetheless, the film clearly, and on balance, swings the argument against HTS. Even those closest to one of the featured protagonists, the late Michael Bhatia (HTS' first fatality), are clear in saying they argued against his joining HTS in the first place. Others instead feel that the film kicks a bit of sand in the eyes, dulling anti-militarist perspectives by encouraging identification with, and sympathy for Bhatia, while raising "good intentions" of "helping to improve" (improve what? war? conflict?) by aiding the military in becoming more "culturally aware"--not that HTS serves to offer classes in hand signals, or the etiquette of drinking tea, which by now surely have been abundantly learned anyway.

Perhaps the sharpest and most memorable part in the whole film for me came from Hugh Gusterson when he explained that the U.S. military, and politicians, make the fundamental mistake of thinking that the continuing conflict facing occupation forces is simply the result of "cultural miscommunication," rather than resistance against foreign domination and social engineering at the point of a gun. The assumption, he noted, is that if U.S. troops could better understand local cultures, then there would be less conflict, which ignores the totally separate motivations for resistance. Invasions and occupations are not the result of some sort of "cultural" mishap, so that the turn to culture--and particularly static and outmoded, functionalist conceptions of culture at that--can only deceive U.S. military practitioners that programs like HTS are a solution, a way of winning the war. As Gusterson said, when you ask the wrong questions, you can only come up with the wrong answers.

As for Bhatia, there was some discussion about how he could delude himself into thinking that by going from being a researcher to a practitioner, he could change the world, and yet remain unchanged himself.

Anthropologies of the Covert

Organized by Carole McGranahan (University of Colorado Boulder), "Anthropologies of the Covert: From Spying and Being Spied Upon to Secret Military Ops and the CIA," was a very long session lasting four hours, on which I served as a discussant.

HTS' Christopher King attended this event also, that is until Roberto González finished his presentation.

David H. Price (St. Martin's University), led the session with his historically dense investigative research into CIA ties in funding the AAA via a front organization called the Asia Foundation. His paper, "The CIA, the Asia Foundation, and the AAA: How the AAA Linked Asian Anthropologists to a CIA Funding Front," is part of a larger work in progress. Price demonstrated the significant extent to which anthropologists, like other social scientists, were linked to military and intelligence agencies throughout the Cold War period, even if unknowingly. As he indicated, if we exclude foundations such as the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations, the CIA was involved in nearly half of the research grants offered in the 1960s. Not seeing the case of the Asia Foundation in isolation, Price reminded us that, "the CIA approached the AAA in 1951 and established a covert relationship with the Executive Board through which the AAA secretly gave the CIA the raw information it collected for its detailed roster with the understanding that the CIA would keep information from this roster for its own uses."

Carole McGranahanfollowed with "Sympathy for the Devil: The CIA, Tibet, and the Humanity of Empire," in which her stated intention was to "humanize" the CIA by two routes, one being by highlighting their affective ties to Tibetan resistance fighters, symbolized by tearful embraces, and two, by arguing that the CIA engaged in covert humanitarianism. Another stated goal was to challenge what in her spoken version she called the "knee jerk reactions" of critics of the CIA, and what in her written version she referred to as "leftist critiques." It was a fairly interesting and controversial paper that seemed to provoke mixed reactions, especially when viewed in contrast with some of the presentations that followed, like the next one.

Anna Roosevelt (University of Illinois Chicago), in "THE HEART OF DARKNESS IS WHITE: The role of the NATO countries in the chaos and killings in Central Africa," presented a shocking litany of a very long history of intense, and often grotesque, Western interventions in the Congo and Rwanda, while also featuring some of her own investigative documentary research that uncovers and exposes the identity of a leading military intelligence agent behind numerous local plots. As I said in my discussion after these three papers, Anna Roosevelt does not write like any Roosevelt I know--and yes, she is related to all of the prominent Roosevelts that readers will know.

Briefly, in my discussant's remarks I said: 1) that I would like to see David Price theorize his work more, and that the case he features seems to contain a lot of ambiguities; 2) that Carole McGranahan ought to explain how an affective approach to some CIA agents can in any way become an anthropological theory of empire, and why in opposing herself to unnamed leftists, she creates the kind of binary that she disdains; and, 3) that Anna Roosevelt's work might be useful as part of a critical dialogue with "responsibility to protect" and other forms of "humanitarian interventionism" that call for foreign military intervention in the Congo--as if more such intervention will fix the problems caused by foreign military intervention in the first place.

One productive coincidence came when both Roberto González and I discussed various research methods for gaining information about military and intelligence agencies. I listed documentary research (such as Price using Freedom of Information Access); interviews and participation in public events; the role of deception as in covert ethnographic research to penetrate state agencies; the use of leaks; and, antagonism. In his excellent presentation, "Methodological Notes on Researching Military and Intelligence Programs," Roberto J. González (San Jose State University), spoke of documents, followed by interviews (with public writing about the contents of documents prompting some from the military and intelligence communities to come forward), and self-analysis (which, in part, involves reflecting on reactions to one's research). Interestingly, a former geospatial intelligence agent on the panel, Nate Keuter, said that he saw the work being done by González as similar to that of an intelligence analyst--and this tied in with his own presentation that argued we could look at the CIA as a research organization (except it's one that kills).

An exceptional paper, with a long-term view of anthropological research of secrets going back to James Mooney and Franz Boas, my favourite passage in González's paper came toward the end when he explained, ever so politely, that, "...this kind of anthropology often requires the use of theoretical concepts or hypotheses to make sense of certain phenomena. An example of this might be the use of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, which can help explain how terms like human terrain lead to the treatment of humans as dirt (or at best, as territory to be conquered) by those who have uncritically adopted the phrase." I believe that it was on this note that HTS' Christopher King, whose presence was indirectly noted by González in his talk, left the room.

The "social science" director of the Human Terrain System goes to﻿ an academic conference, is a victim of his own unintentional honesty, and then presses Case Western Reserve University to take the video offline. Irony? The conference had to do with the plight of the university in the national security state.--Make a copy of the video, and feel free to upload anywhere.

Human Terrain Mapping at Home is "Scary": The Video the Human Terrain System Does Not Want You to See

This is the video (below), back online again, that one participant--either Dr. Christopher A. King, Social Science Director of the Human Terrain System, or Dr. George Lucas (we have since confirmed that it was King)--wanted Case Western Reserve University to take offline. This video also features Dr. David A. Price, who did not agree to be censored, at what was, after all, an academic conference. AJP was informed by Dr. Price that all of the participants were required to sign media releases. This video is being presented once more, in the public interest, from an event that was neither secret nor classified, for the purposes of research, analysis, and for journalists to use in any possible reporting. The video is available in multiple locations--and to be safe, everyone reading this should make a copy of the video (one option is to download RealPlayer if you have not done so already, and then download a copy of the video to your computer).

Regarding Case Western's decision to reverse itself, and remove this video from public view, Dr. Price stated: " I find this lack of transparency to be disturbing and would likely not have attended if I'd known these military spokespersons would not be abiding by the same rules of openness governing others at this symposium." It is probable that the reason the video was removed was in part due to AJP's previous article, "Anthropology at War: Human Terrain Social Science Director Admits Human Terrain Mapping is Scary, Troubling." This level of unguarded honesty, and unintentional accuracy, likely proved embarrassing to the Human Terrain System. As we said in that article (now updated):

Perhaps two of the more stunning, and yet brief, moments to come out of a panel recently held at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, was when the Social Science Director of the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System (HTS), anthropologist Dr. Christopher A. King, essentially condemned his own program with what in hindsight he may call a careless admission. The moment comes in response to comments from an American Muslim audience member, that begins at the 1:08:24 mark. She raises the point about how human terrain mapping has been brought back home, and is applied to Muslim communities in New York City. In response, Dr. King clearly states that he finds this “scary” and then says it is “pretty troubling”, later repeating “troubling, that’s for sure”. As a co-panelist, Dr. David H. Price, anthropologist at St. Martin’s University, noted this (see the 1:12:56 mark), he remarked that it seems to be fine to apply the techniques against “Others” abroad, but suddenly it is not so good when applied domestically. What Dr. King thus leaves open is that locals in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, in their homes, are justified in viewing HTS as scary and troubling, the same way that critics have observed it is scary and troubling. After years of public debate, we owe thanks to Dr. King for finally confirming that what we knew all along was correct, now even from his own perspective.

The second striking moment comes toward the very end of the first video below, when Dr. King admits, audibly, to Dr. Price, that he does not know what COINTELPRO is and has never heard of it before (see the 1:14:07 mark), even though it arguably provides many of the foundations for HTS itself.

The event at which these remarks were made was “The University and National Security after 9/11”--Panel II: “Academics at War: Anthropologists and other Social Scientists in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the Framing of Counterinsurgency Doctrine” (Arthur W. Fiske Memorial Lecture, Case Western Reserve University School of Law, Institute for Global Security Law and Policy, September 23, 2011).

For more about the collaboration between the New York Police Department, the CIA, and the FBI, in applying "human terrain mapping" back at home see the following news articles and primary documents. Note that the current CIA director, General David Petraeus, actively endorsed HTS as he marshalled the production of the Army's Counterinsurgency Manual.

Law enforcement is watching the day-to-day activities of thousands upon thousands of Muslims, with focus on mosques and hookah (waterpipe) bars, Pakistani cab drivers and the devout. Relying on informants, undercover cops, and a vast structure for information-sharing and joint policing, the FBI and NYPD - with assistance from the CIA - are working toward a cartography of Muslim communities. This mapping is being done in the name of national security. But on what theory?

....The NYPD’s 2007 report reads as a blueprint for the recent news about the NYPD’s profiles of 250 mosques and Muslim student groups in the NYC area, and its deployment of mosque “rakers” and “crawlers” to listen in on sermons and geo-map Muslim communities.

A new investigation by the Associated Press reveals how, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the New York City Police Department decided it could no longer trust other agencies to prevent terrorism and started expanding its own intelligence gathering. In the process, it became "one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies," targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government. The report, titled "With CIA Help, NYPD Moves Covertly in Muslim Areas," also finds that these operations "benefited from unprecedented help from the CIA, a partnership that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying." The report details how police used informants, known as "mosque crawlers," to monitor sermons, even without any evidence of wrongdoing. Also falling under NYPD’s scrutiny were imams, taxi cab drivers and food cart vendors — jobs often done by Muslims.

On Aug. 24, Apuzzo and Goldman broke open the NYPD spying story: the NYPD, in cooperation with the CIA, ran a post-9/11 spying operation targeting Muslims that would “run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government." The CIA can't legally spy on U.S. citizens, but they appeared to help the NYPD do just that. NYPD officers, even without specific leads involving criminal activity, have collected information on people inside restaurants serving halal meat, Muslim student associations, Islamic schools, ethnic bookstores, hookah bars and mosques.

"Mapping crimes has been a successful police strategy nationwide," the AP wrote. "But mapping robberies and shootings is one thing. Mapping ethnic neighborhoods is different, something that at least brushes against what the federal government considers racial profiling."

A U.S. citizen in Queens, for example, starts work each day at what police labeled "a known Moroccan barbershop." The AP previously revealed the secret operations of the NYPD intelligence division as it mapped the Muslim community in and around New York, monitored life in ethnic neighborhoods and scrutinized mosques. The Moroccan Initiative was one of the division's projects. Such programs began with help from the CIA under President George W. Bush and have continued with at least the tacit support of President Barack Obama, whose administration repeatedly has sidestepped questions about them. It is unclear whether Mayor Michael Bloomberg oversaw the programs. He has refused to comment directly about them.

....The documents on the Moroccan businesses were compiled by a team called the Demographics Unit, which police originally denied existed. After the AP obtained police documents describing the unit as a team of 16 officers with a mission to map and monitor ethnic neighborhoods, the department said the Demographics Unit used to exist but never had more than eight officers.

....No other police department in the United States is known to employ programs like New York's. Police in Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest city, once considered a program that would have mapped the area's Muslim communities, but it was shut down after news coverage brought wide criticism.

The Demographics Unit, a squad of 16 officers fluent in a total of at least five languages, was told to map ethnic communities in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and identify where people socialize, shop and pray. Once that analysis was complete, according to documents obtained by the AP, the NYPD would "deploy officers in civilian clothes throughout the ethnic communities."....

Working out of the police department's offices at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, the Demographics Unit maintained a list of 28 countries that, along with "American Black Muslim," it considered "ancestries of interest." Nearly all are Muslim countries. Police used census data and government databases to map areas it considered "hot spots" as well as the ethnic neighborhoods of New York's tri-state area, the documents show. Undercover officers known as "rakers" - a term the NYPD also denied existed - were then told to participate in social activities such as cricket matches and visit cafes and clubs, the documents show.

According to the report, the NYPD dispatches “rakers,” the NYPD term, into a “human mapping program” to monitor the daily lives of Muslim Americans in the places where ordinary living transpires, such as bookstores, cafés, bars, and nightclubs, without the hint of criminal wrongdoing. The police department also employs “mosque crawlers,” who scrutinize imams and their sermons, and have gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs commonly associated with Muslim workers.

Here are some links to pages worthy of note, on the securitization and militarization of the Canadian university, and how priorities for research are being reoriented to surveillance at home and intervention abroad, realigning academic research with the imperatives of the national security state and not with the broader public that funds our universities. As AJP comes across more resources, we will consolidate these for readers and interested colleagues, with a specific focus on Canadian universities. In the meantime, please visit our Documents and Library pages for more resources that are relevant.

"...Once considered an arcane branch of Cold War-era political science, security and intelligence studies now attracts interest from historians, sociologists -- even engineers trying to design structures that might become terrorist targets. At least 10 Canadian universities offer courses dealing with security and intelligence issues....The U.S. government's response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks resulted in the allocation of billions of dollars for intelligence and security agencies. The spillover is felt at American colleges and universities that have been able to start new courses and programs. The Department of Homeland Security finances faculty positions at 'centres of excellence' at six universities and 23 partner universities....Ottawa has also allocated considerable sums for security in recent years, but academics in Canada say they aren't seeing the same kind of benefit as their American colleagues...."

"As universities struggle to meet the growing post-9-11 demand for courses in security and intelligence, Canada's spy agency has revved up recruiting efforts to fill positions soon to be vacated by retiring baby boomers."

Here are some links to pages worthy of note, on the securitization and militarization of the Canadian university, and how priorities for research are being reoriented to surveillance at home and intervention abroad, realigning academic research with the imperatives of the national security state and not with the broader public that funds our universities. As AJP comes across more resources, we will consolidate these for readers and interested colleagues, with a specific focus on Canadian universities.

"16 Within the domestic realm there are a number of audiences that are critical for the Canadian Forces to fully understand — each with its specific beliefs, values, and attitudes and, consequently, behaviors. The first target domestic audience is the general Canadian public itself. Understanding Canadian beliefs, values, and attitudes is critically important for a number of reasons. First, public confidence and support is crucial for the continuing vitality of the CF. The 'decade of darkness' of the 1990s, when a series of scandals eroded governmental and public confidence and support in the CF, demonstrated the danger of losing touch with Canadian societal sensitivities and beliefs in such basic concepts as accountability, integrity, and transparency. This erosion in CF support impacted the Department of National Defence (DND) and the CF in a myriad of ways from budgetary support to recruiting and the ability to investigate and regulate itself as an autonomous profession. In essence, public support engenders political support, which can lead directly to credibility and trust, which in turn leads to freedom of action. Indeed, continuing Canadian participation in Afghanistan is directly tied to public sentiment and support.

"17 A 'cultural' comprehension of the general Canadian public also has an impact on recruiting. An understanding of what is important to Canadians, and what triggers their commitment and support, is key to developing the necessary approaches to attract young Canadians to join the CF. If the public understand the CF and its members, if there is a deep-rooted connection between them and the CF, particularly its mission and importance to national security, temporary crises or scandals will be less traumatic and have a shorter lasting effect.

"18 Finally, a cultural understanding of the general Canadian public is an important source of information. As the threat to Western societies grows through both the interconnected globalized world and through radicalization of home-grown terrorists through the internet or simply from domestic disenfranchised elements, the CF will increasingly be called on to assist law enforcement agencies (LEA) in a domestic context. As such, understanding what is important to Canadians from a cultural, ideological, and/ or attitudinal perspective will be critical for ensuring active support of the CF and equally to prevent alienation, passivity, or even active resistance while assisting LEAs in Canada."

The same article also evaluates the utility of the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System (HTS) for its possible lessons for Canadian cultural counterinsurgency. For more along those lines, see the next item:

"The Human Terrain System (HTS) is an innovative method of gaining an appreciation for and understanding of the cultural aspects that shape different perspectives within a given society. When properly implemented, the Human Terrain System (HTS) helps clarify previous assumptions or gaps in understanding that had plagued the Army in previous years. This tool allows the commander and his or her staff the ability to visualize the complexity of the social systems within their area of operations so that they are more capable of understanding root causes of conflict and conceptualizing possible second and third-order consequences of their actions. It further allows the commander and his staff the ability to better understand the situation from the perspective of the population and potential adversaries." (page 55)

2010 CASIS International Conference--The Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies (CASIS) held their annual conference in Ottawa from October 14th to 15th. The theme of this year's conference was "Understanding National Security". This session on October 14th was on "The Toronto 18 and Radicalization in Canada" and featured presentations by Mubin Shaikh (a former undercover agent in the Toronto 18 investigation), Michael King (Department of Psychology at McGill University) and Stewart Bell (senior reporter for the National Post).

2010 CASIS International Conference--The Canadian Association for Security and Intelligence Studies (CASIS) held their annual conference in Ottawa from October 14th to 15th. The theme of this year's conference was "Understanding National Security". This session on October 14th was on "The Toronto 18 and Radicalization in Canada" and featured presentations by Mubin Shaikh (a former undercover agent in the Toronto 18 investigation), Michael King (Department of Psychology at McGill University) and Stewart Bell (senior reporter for the National Post).

Perhaps the most interesting of the workshop "mentors," at least for those about whom some details are known, was Eric Rotzoll, a military man with intelligence community connections.

As a deputy commander of a "provincial reconstruction team" (PRT) in Zabul Province, Afghanistan in 2004 and 2005, he planned and led civil affairs operations in support of counterinsurgency in the region. From 2006 to 2010, he worked as an "all source analyst" for Defense Department intelligence subcontractor Northrop Grumman. Still with the military at that time, he also served from July 2008 to July 2009 as a Human Terrain Team (HTT) leader in Afghanistan.

The HTTs, ostensibly comprising privately contracted civilian anthropologists and other social scientists, have been assigned to each Army brigade in Iraq and Afghanistan since late 2005. Armed on patrol, such "academic embeds" have worked to provide cultural and social "human intelligence," or "Humint," on various "locals" as part of the counterinsurgency effort in both countries.

In January, 2009, an embedded journalist moving with an HTT unit on the ground in Afghanistan identified Rotzoll as "the man in charge" and "a former analyst for the CIA...." No mere enlisted man, but an academically trained intelligence warrior, Rotzoll apparently brought a particular added expertise to the "Grand Strategy Workshop." His name also subsequently appeared on the UW JASONs roster for 2009-2010, his affiliation listed simply as "US Army."